Watch Me
by Moedad
Summary: Jack Reacher is being paid to deliver a car from Wyoming to California. That's the short story. The long story is more complicated. It usually is with Reacher. Is he being set up? And what is Reacher's connection to a certain sheriff from Absaroka County, WY? Only one way to find out. This is a Reacher/Longmire crossover story with the Walt Longmire from Craig Johnson's novels.
1. Chapter 1: Reacher

**Watch Me**

A Jack Reacher - Walt Longmire Crossover Story

 **Reacher**

Hours had passed since the sun dropped in an eye-watering orange blaze behind the jagged, black horizon. I was on a lonely back road, winding through the low, dry ranges of northwest Colorado. At least I thought it was still Colorado. High desert, nearly. The headlights from my car cut through the night, showing thin crusts of snow drifted along the skeletal ridges and anorexic flanks of the terrain.

An hour had passed since I'd seen any sign of a house or ranch. No towns coming up for at least another hour. The only traffic was somebody miles ahead, and the only way I knew that was because, every once in a while, I'd see his tail lights winking at me as he negotiated the same undulating roadway I was following. And it was cold. The defroster blasted away on nearly maximum just to keep the windshield clear. In spite of that, thin graceful patterns of ice were crystalizing on the inside of the windows above the door panels.

I had a blues station out of Hot Springs, Arkansas, playing on the radio, beamed across nine hundred miles by that ionospheric skip you sometimes get with late night AM radio. Can't get it listening to FM. Something about the signal frequencies.

I'd already passed through several little towns with motel signs showing VACANCY in red neon letters, but I was enjoying the music too much to stop. The winding road, the glimpses of tawny, scrub-covered hillsides, and the dashed line down the center, combined with the darkness and the music, had worked some kind of spell, something perfect, something I'd only experienced a few times in my life. A magic kind of extended moment, like it might never end, and that was fine with me. The guy playing the records was one of those guys who's been around radio practically since it was invented, and he knew the history of every song and every artist he played, tossing in bits and pieces of it in between songs. Real esoteric stuff about early blues artists like Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy, or Ma Rainey. I ate it up.

I was driving a forest green 1972 Buick Riviera boat tail coupe, the one with the big back window that looks like the cowl of a fighter jet. A huge pimp mobile in any other color, but the green gave it a classy look. The short story was I was doing a favor for an elderly little woman for whom I'd held open a door. The long story got more complicated.

But the Riviera was a fantastic old car. Not _old_ old, not like the blues on the radio, but old enough. Old enough not to have a CD or cassette player. Old enough that power features were an uncommon luxury option-little chrome tabs in little chrome frames set in the cushioned arm on the wood-grain door panel. Wide, wrap-around instrument cluster in the dash, chrome-accented radio and heater/AC controls. Cream-colored leather seats with miles of leg room.

It was nearly two in the morning when I saw the dog.

The Buick's headlights picked it up as the Riv swept through a curve on the deserted two lane road. Some kind of big, russet-colored hound, limping along the shoulder, holding its rear right leg off the ground.

I slowed down to a crawl as I drew even with him. He was a huge, raw-boned old bloodhound. No collar. Past his prime by more than a few years, his lean muscle all gone to loose, sagging hide. He didn't so much as turn his head to look at the car as he hobbled along through dead, dried weeds and patches of dirty snow on the shoulder of the road.

I'd never had much to do with dogs. The Marines moved our family too often when I was a kid to ever make having a pet any kind of practical. I'd eaten dog in the Philippines, but aside from that, most of my experience with them had been through the K9 officers I worked with in the Army. Those were always big wolfish German Shepherds, trained to sniff out drugs and other contraband hidden by soldiers in their quarters, their duty areas, and their vehicles. They were highly trained animals who lived to please their handlers and rip limbs off of anybody else. So I left them alone.

But I couldn't bring myself to leave this dog alone. The temperature had to be hovering around zero, and he didn't look like he had an ounce of insulating fat on his entire gangly body.

Ten yards in front of the dog, I pulled over. Two wheels in the hard-packed frozen dirt of the shoulder. Two wheels still on the equally cold asphalt. I reached across and opened the passenger side door. It was like opening the door to a big industrial freezer. Bone chilling air piled into the car. The dog approached the Riviera at the same slow, shambling pace, until he came even with the open door. It was a long door, long enough to block his progress. He patiently shifted his path to detour around it, still not bothering to look anywhere but straight ahead.

I leaned over and pulled the door almost closed, and let the car move forward another five yards by lifting my foot off the gas, then stopped again. I let go of the door and the dampened momentum of the car pulled it open. The dog drew even again and this time he stopped. He looked in at me, his dark eyes unreadable, his drooping jowls quivering in the cold.

"I'm going the same way you are," I said. "It's a lot warmer in here."

The dog looked at me for a long moment, then turned his big knobby head and looked on down the road, as if trying to make up his mind. Then he moved closer to the open door. He reached out with a tentative, testing paw, almost losing his balance. He tried but he couldn't make it into the car. Just looked at me and shivered.

I opened my door and climbed out into the frigid air. The car was in a bubble of light made by the headlights blazing into the night and the dome light spilling through the open door. I circled around the rear of the Riv to the passenger side where the dog stood, waiting.

He was bigger than he looked from inside the car. No way I'd fit him in the front passenger foot well, or on the seat next to me for that matter.

I reached into the car and nudged the little chrome tab in the little chrome frame that operated the passenger power seat to move the seat forward as far as it would go. I folded the seatback toward the glove box.

The dog stood there, waiting.

I realized I'd never put a dog in a back seat before. I'd put plenty of people in back seats. Lined them up next to the door and put one hand on top of their head and pushed down at the same time I used my other hand to stuff them through the car door. Sometimes they cooperated and sometimes they didn't, but they always went in. That's a downward procedure though. It wouldn't work here. This needed to be a kind of lateral process.

I straddled his body and reached down with both hands under his bony ribcage and lifted and sort of walked his front end into the rear foot well. So far, so good. I wasn't sure how badly his right leg was injured. I didn't know if he'd let me touch it. I thought about lifting him by his tail. He'd been pretty cooperative so far, but I seemed to remember some dogs hate having their tails grabbed. There was a patch of raw skin, an oozing scrape the size of my palm, on his right hip. Thin and not-so-thin white scars crisscrossed the short hair on the rest of the dog's hindquarters and shoulders. There were fresher scars too.

In the end, I used a combination technique. I grabbed his rear left leg with one hand and his tail with the other and hoisted him in the rest of the way. It didn't go as smoothly as all that. As I pushed his rear into the car, he lifted his front legs one at a time and sort of army-crawled onto the seat while I guided his haunches into the car. There were some awkward grunts on both our parts and he let out one sharp whimper when he pulled his injured leg up onto the seat. I got him settled and pull the seatback down and closed the door.

I crunched back around the rear of the car to the driver's side and climbed in. Closed the door. Now that he was in the car, the dog was shivering violently. His teeth actually chattered. I didn't know dogs did that. My own face was stiff from the cold and I had no feeling in my fingers. I fumbled the heat up a notch and the fan up two notches. Pushed down on the lever that diverted the air to blow on my feet, figuring a lot of that warm air would go under the front seats and up to where the dog stretched out along the entire length of the rear bench.

I pulled the chrome column-mounted shift lever out of "P", eased the car back onto the road, and was on my way again.

I didn't know what to do about the dog beyond some vague kind of idea about stopping in the next town. How long did a veterinary office stay open? Unclear. If they were anything like a regular doctor's office, they'd probably be closed. Maybe there would be an after-hours emergency number to call.

"Where do you live?" I asked over my shoulder.

The dog said nothing.


	2. Chapter 2: Reacher

The day before, I was in Casper, Wyoming. My savings were getting low so I was hitching rides instead of taking the bus. It'd been slow going, although people seemed a little more inclined to pick up a stranger in the winter, so that had been working in my favor. The plan was to hitch down to San Diego. I wanted to be some place warm for a few months, and I've spent enough time in the Gulf states in previous years. Time for something fresher. I stayed the night in a little motel where a trucker dropped me off, just south of town on Hwy. 220, then in the morning I stepped out of my room into the frosty dawn and headed to a diner across the highway to get a hot breakfast before catching another ride. No telling how long I'd be standing in the cold with my thumb out.

I held the diner door open for a tiny old woman with a huge black purse who was just getting there as well. She acknowledged my gesture with a curt nod, moving in that slow, hobbling gait the elderly use. The one that lets you know that they've spent a whole lifetime hurrying to get places and they aren't going to let themselves be hurried anymore, that's for damn sure. I figured anybody who moves that slow had to be a local. No way to get her to travel too far from home. Probably took all day to run a couple of errands. Her silvery hair was permed close against her skull and she wore black horn-rim glasses, and a thick black sweater. A dark gray skirt, wool maybe, with a hem below her knees, baggy dark stockings, and low-heeled black shoes. A study in monochrome.

She stopped inside the door, looked around, a determined set to her jaw. A waitress hustled by with a pot of coffee and a plate of French toast, said we could sit anywhere. There was a long counter with chrome bar stools, and booths against the window on both sides of the door. A scattering of customers filled in some of the blank spots in a few of the booths. A trucker wearing a greasy Peterbilt hat and a vest over a plaid shirt sat at the end of counter down to the left, nearest the restrooms, wolfing down an omelet.

I waited to see which way the old woman wanted to go. She turned left. I turned right and took a seat in a corner booth where I could see the front door. The old woman stopped. She peered at the booths ahead of her. Then she rotated herself in a circle, counter-clockwise, a half step at a time. First one foot, then the other, until she faced in my direction. She studied the booths on my side of the diner and hobbled forward until she made it to a booth bathed in the weak winter sunlight coming through the front window. She swung her huge black purse onto the seat, hitched it over to make room for herself, then sat down with her back to me, two booths away.

The waitress came back and scribbled down the old woman's order, poured her a cup of coffee into a mug, one of two already on the table. She called the old woman "Pearl." A local, no doubt about it. Next she came to my table. There were two coffee mugs on my table, just like Pearl's. I nudged the one in front of me toward the waitress.

She poured. I ordered. "The pancakes, and hash browns with the sausage links. Thanks."

"Be right back with that." She gave me a quick friendly wink, and hustled away. If it was a bigger tip she was hoping for, she'd get it. I'm a sucker for the wink.

Pearl was fidgeting in her seat. She had her back to me but I could tell by the movements of her shoulders and upper arms that she had a napkin or something in her hands and she was twisting the hell out of it. Her glance kept going out the window and I got a good look at her profile. Pearl was probably never what you'd call a beautiful woman. Her features were course, broad, but there was a dignity and strength to them as well. Her jaw was working as though she was biting back the words of an argument she wanted to have.

The waitress came back with a bowl of oatmeal for Pearl, then a few minutes later she was at my table with my own breakfast. She laid it out in front of me with a smile that implied there was no place she'd rather be.

"Let me know if you'd like anything else," she said. I was leaving town, so I didn't tell her what else I'd like.

For a while the only sounds in the place were some tinny big band music over the diner's sound system, and silverware scraping on ceramic. Then at the far end of the counter, the trucker swore and slammed down his fork. The waitress approached him hesitantly.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

"You tell me! Is this roach part of the omelet? What kind of place are you running here?"

"I'm so sorry, sir! Can I get you another omelet? No charge?"

"No, you can't 'get me another omelet!' You think I want to have _more_ after almost eating a damned _cockroach_?"

Heads were turning to look by now. A cook came out from the back, wiping his hands on his grease-stained apron. He was a short, Hispanic man with a thick accent. "What ees the matter?"

"He says he found a roach in his omelet," the waitress replied.

The trucker slid back off of his stool and said, "When I get back to my radio, I'll make sure I let every rig on the interstate know to stay away from this place!"

The cook said, "Please. There ees no charge for your meal. Next time you come, you have whatever you wan'. We don' wan' no problems. Please."

"Well, you _got_ a problem!" With a sweep of his arm the trucker cleared his place setting and coffee mug off the stainless steel countertop. The crockery shattered on the tile floor, the noise making the other customers flinch in their booths. He turned and stalked toward the door.

He stopped short.

I was standing in his way. The diner was quiet, everybody watching to see how this was going to play out.

"You don't want a free omelet," I said. "Maybe you're upset and you lost your appetite. I get it. But you're not walking out of here without paying for those dishes."

"The hell I'm not!"

He was an average sized guy. Average height, average weight. Which made me more than half a head taller and fifty pounds heavier. He couldn't get around me unless he pushed me aside. Wasn't going to happen.

He glared at me. I looked back at him, nothing but love for my fellow man on my face. There was a patch stitched on to his vest that read, "Ron" in embroidered cursive letters.

"Ten dollars to get by, Ron."

His face was turning red, a vein on his forehead, throbbing and pumping furiously. He stood there for another five seconds or so, then he pulled a leather wallet out of his hip pocket. A thick silver chain fastened the wallet to his belt.

He pulled out a ten dollar bill and slapped it down hard on the stainless steel counter, then he spit on the tile floor and turned back to face me.

"You didn't leave a tip," I said.


	3. Chapter 3: Reacher

We looked at each other some more as he turned such a deep shade of red I thought he'd have a stroke. He peeled a dollar out of his wallet and smacked it down on top of the ten.

I shook my head. "A bigger tip," I said.

After a moment, he slowly extracted a five dollar bill and laid it carefully on top of the other two bills.

"Thank you, Ron. That's very kind of you." I stepped aside.

Ron rushed past me and slammed open the door. A smattering of applause came from the other customers. A big truck idled in the vacant lot next door and he headed in that direction. About halfway there, he turned around and gave me and the others both of his middle fingers as he walked backwards. What I imagined to be obscenities were spewing out of his mouth, but his voice was faint and indecipherable. His manhood restored, he turned back toward his truck.

"You didn't have to do that," the waitress said.

"Of course I did. You winked at me. We're practically engaged. I couldn't let him get away with that."

I went back to my booth to finish my breakfast. As I wiped up the last bit of syrup with the last bite of pancake, Pearl got up to leave. Only she didn't leave. She tottered to my booth and asked, "May I sit down?"

Ever the gentleman, my mouth full of pancake, I gestured to the bench across from me with my fork. Pearl heaved her purse ahead of her onto the vinyl seat, put both palms on the table top and lowered herself carefully onto the bench. Slid over until she sat directly across from me.

"I'm dying," she said.

It was a statement. An opening statement. I said nothing.

"I have two kids," she said. "Well, they're not kids anymore, they're grown-ups. A son and a daughter."

I said nothing.

"I have a car I want my daughter to have. She lives in Fresno. In California. My son wants the car. He's in jail. In Denver. He's being released today. Actually, he's probably been released already. He'll be coming for the car."

"Why wait until now?" I said. "Why didn't you sell it already?"

"My husband loved this car. He died a few years ago of a heart attack. I've been hanging onto it because I'm old and everything is changing and the car is what's left of our lives. Now I'm dying and I would rather give it to my daughter than let my son have it."

"What are you dying from?"

"Does it matter?"

"I suppose not."

"You seem like a man who can handle things. I want to hire you to take the car to Fresno for my daughter."

I thought about it for a few moments. I wanted warm. How cold could Fresno be? It's in California, right?

Pearl sat still, watching me think.

"You have all the paperwork?" I asked. "The registration stuff?"

"Yes. All you need to do is hand it all over to her. I'll pay you five hundred dollars."

"Two hundred will be plenty."

"I'll pay you five hundred dollars, plus food and gas."

I shrugged. "Okay."

She hitched to the end of the bench seat, dragging her huge black purse behind her, and pushed herself to her feet. I left twenty dollars on the table and slid out of the booth. Followed her out of the diner with a nod to the waitress, who waved goodbye with a wistful expression. The truck driver and his rig were long gone. Pearl led the way, slowly, to a 1990-ish Toyota Corolla.

"I'm not one to disrespect a person's choice of transportation," I said, "but this isn't worth what you want to spend to have me drive it to Fresno. You should just send your daughter the $500. Let your son have the car. Everybody wins, except maybe him."

"This isn't the car."

I opened her door, not for the sake of chivalry, but to save time. Pearl tucked her purse behind the driver seat and wheezed down into the car. Circling around, I opened the passenger door and folded into the vehicle. It listed badly.

Pearl checked the mirrors, muttering to herself. Started the car and crept through the parking lot to the driveway, and out into the street.

She drove, slowly, to an old suburb a few miles away. She pulled into one side of the driveway of a small, ramshackle house with a detached garage and used a remote to operate the old, peeling garage door. The springs groaned as it tilted back at the top, swinging up to reveal a dark green 1972 Buick Riviera waiting inside, gleaming dully in the light of the opening.

 _"_ _That's_ the car?"

She nodded.

"I thought the Toyota was old. Will this make it to Fresno?"

"It hasn't been sitting. I take it to the market and church once in a while. You're not afraid, are you?"

I smiled. "Just skeptical."

The reason for my skepticism was implied in my chronological comparison with the Toyota. But the smile was because I knew Pearl would buy the implication, no questions asked. The actual skepticism was for an entirely different reason. It made it seem reasonable to reconsider the proposition. Gave me time to think about what should be done. Because if this was what my gut feeling was telling me, there were things to consider.

First, my gut feeling could be wrong. It's happened before.

But not very often.

A lot depended on what Pearl had to say in the next few minutes.

She pulled another set of keys out of her big black purse. Sidled into the garage, and plopped the purse on the hood of the car. Edged between stacks of boxes and the driver's side, unlocked the door, and squeezed into the driver's seat.

The engine started right up. She let the car roll forward. It seemed to take a long time. It just kept coming and coming, until its entire length cleared the garage. It was a huge car. Had to be eighteen or twenty feet. It looked like a green rocket, ready to blast into orbit. She left the motor running and extracted herself carefully from the car. Retrieved her purse from the hood.

"It might be not a good idea to spend a lot of time at interstate speeds," she said. "It hasn't been over sixty-five in years."

"Hard to avoid the interstates between here and California. Which way do you think I should go?"

"Oh, I suppose I'd head west. You can easily make it to Lander tonight, maybe even down to Rock Springs. If the car is doing okay, you can use your judgment."

"Maps in the glove box?"

"Yes."

"Spare and jack in the trunk?" I watched her eyes, looking for any telltale sign. Saw nothing.

"Yes. Go ahead and check it though, it's been a while since I looked at them."

I leaned in to pop the trunk release. I heard a clunk sound and the trunk lid opened all by itself. I walked to the back and found the spare in a well under the trunk floor, with the jack underneath. I knocked on the tire with a knuckle. It sounded like I imagined a properly inflated tire should. Other than those items, the trunk was clean and empty. Pristine even.

Closing the trunk, I walked back to the driver's side and slid into the seat. The engine idled smoothly. The gauges looked good. I let my eyes sweep the interior. The door panels were clean. I ran my fingers lightly over the headliner and around the edges. All in good shape. The front and back floor mats were in even better shape. The seats were smooth. No cracks, no blemishes, no stains. Maybe I was wrong.

I opened the glove box. The registration paperwork was there, along with a few maps for Wyoming and the states between Casper and Fresno.

"Okay," I said. "Tell your daughter I should be there in a few days."

Pearl gave me an envelope with one thousand dollars in twenties and a slip of paper with the address. "Thank you," she said.

"You're taking a chance on me. You don't even know my name. What if I just keep the car and the money and go east instead of west?"

"You've got an honest face. I have a good feeling about you. But your name might be handy to have."

"Barkley. Alben Barkley." He was vice president under Truman, but I didn't think Pearl would remember that.

"Sounds like you come from good stock," she said.

I pulled the big door closed. Adjusted the mirrors. Drew the seat belt across and latched it. With a nod to Pearl, I pulled out of the driveway. In the rearview mirror, I watched her watch me drive away, a perfect stranger in her dead husband's car with a thousand of her dollars.


	4. Chapter 4: Reacher

I didn't drive west as she instructed. I didn't drive east. Instead I made a few random loops around town, watching the mirrors.

I saw nothing unusual. I found the way back to Highway 220 and headed south, crossing the muddy Platte River on a four lane concrete bridge with low steel guard rails, my eyes still on the mirrors.

After negotiating several miles of residential sprawl, the road brought me out into open range and through a small range of low, brown hills, and eventually broke out into a wide valley, paralleling what used to be the Oregon Trail. I only knew that because I occasionally saw the state historic marker signs along the shoulder of the road. The signs were about the only thing to see. The land around was arid and featureless. Nothing but scrub brush and very little of that. In the distance, low wrinkles of dark hills marked the far boundaries of the valley.

Fifty miles down the road, I came to a rest area and pulled in. It was adjacent to a state historic site where travelers heading to Oregon and California in covered wagons used to chip their names in a huge outcropping of granite. Today it would be considered vandalism, but I guess one hundred and fifty or sixty years changes peoples' minds on what constitutes graffiti.

The rest area was deserted. I drove to a far corner of the parking area and climbed out. Stretched my arms over my head, then stared off into the distance. Thinking.

The Riviera's engine ticked as it cooled. A bit of wind sifted through the low brush along the edge of the parking lot. Other than that, there was no sound, none at all. I remembered the old phrase: "The silence was deafening." The person that came up with that must've coined it after being out on the high plains of Wyoming. Off beyond the rest area, the giant hump of rock gathered shadows from the late afternoon. It wasn't hard to imagine pioneers dressed in sun-bleached clothing, clambering over the rock, chipping their names into its surface as the _clink-clink_ noise of their tools etching the stone carried back to the wagons.

I turned back to the car. Walked a circle around it, studying it. I popped the trunk again. Checked it more thoroughly than I did at Pearl's. I did the same to the interior, practically crawling up under the dash at one point. Looked at the paperwork again, what little there was of it.

Finally I closed the trunk. Locked the doors with the little chrome lock button in the door panel. Headed over to the deserted welcome center. I entered, walked past the colorful displays and historical information and found the men's room. I went into a stall and closed the door, dropped my pants and took a seat. I sat for a long time, much longer than necessary.

Thinking.

See, here's the thing: the odds of a little old lady handing a hulking stranger a thousand dollars to drive a cherished car a thousand miles are slim and none. Sure, it was possible, but it wasn't the likely answer. The most likely answer, the first thing that came to mind was a smuggling scheme, with me as the unwitting mule tasked to unknowingly deliver several hundred pounds of contraband—drugs, weapons, whatever—to a third party.

But a slim chance was still a chance, especially when she opened the garage to reveal a car that would blend in on the road the way I would blend in a school room full of kindergarteners. Smuggling is an activity best conducted as inconspicuously as possible. And a woman of Pearl's vintage having a '72 Riviera in her garage wasn't a stretch of the imagination.

So contraband was not as likely as it first seemed. Instinct told me to search the car anyway, but two searches—the quick one in front of Pearl's garage and the one there at the rest stop—turned up nothing. That left the car itself as the item being smuggled.

So here's Pearl. Pearl sitting in a restaurant with sets of keys for two different cars and a thousand dollars in an envelope in her purse.

Seemed easy enough to figure out. She had money and keys for a driver who hadn't shown up. After twenty minutes of waiting, she aborted whatever plan she was working and out of desperation made the spontaneous decision to get me to take the other driver's place. Somebody had already taken her original driver out of play, either by violence or with a monetary incentive. That tells me the son or whoever Pearl was worried about is already in town.

The slow laps around town were on the off chance I might pick up a tail, maybe get an idea of what I'm dealing with and who the players might be. But whoever they were, they weren't biting. There's no way the Riviera could drive around town for almost an hour without being noticed by somebody with even one eye open. They had something else in mind.

I finished business and pulled up my pants. Flushed. Exited the stall and the men's room. Walked back past the displays and information, and out of the building. I paused in front of it and listened. The chill air of purple dusk was as quiet as when I arrived. I walked back across the parking lot to the Riviera, unlocked it, and slid in.

I popped open the glove box and pulled out a map again. One side showed the state of Wyoming. The other side, Colorado. I looked at the map in the yellow light of the dome fixture in the roof liner, first the Wyoming side, then the Colorado side, where I would find out one way or the other if I was right or wrong about Pearl.

I started the Riv and steered it back out onto the road again, keeping an eye on my mirror, but it was Wyoming. It was a secondary road, at night, in winter. Nothing showed in the mirrors but the occasional flare of my own brake lights as I slowed for a curve. I made it down to Interstate 80, picking it up near Rawlins through landscape that hadn't gotten any greener or less deserted.

Before getting on the interstate, I stopped to fill up the car even though it wasn't empty because I wasn't sure when or where I'd have a next chance to get gas. To put gas in the car, the rear license plate under the big chrome bumper had a hinge that flipped down to expose the fuel cap. Felt a little like a James Bond kind of design. I twisted off the cap and used it to wedge the plate spring open. Even though the tank was full in Casper, it took almost eleven gallons to fill again, and the gauge hadn't even been down to halfway. How big was the gas tank in this thing? I was only getting something like 10 or 11 miles to the gallon. Might as well have been back in the Army driving a Hum-Vee. I started to wonder if the extra $500 would be enough.

Finishing up, I got back in the car and headed west along the interstate. The Riviera ran strong and smooth through the empty darkness. No sign of mechanical trouble. I didn't want to stay on the interstate though. It was the obvious way to go, and obvious is not the way I do things.

The first chance I got, I took another secondary road south into Colorado, still keeping an eye in the rear-view. I zig-zagged across the corner of the state, working my way west and south, and that's where I found the dog.


	5. Chapter 5: Reacher

"Where do you live?" I asked over my shoulder.

The dog said nothing, but I heard a muted, slow thump-thump against the bench seat, as if his tail was replying to my question to say, "I'm tired, can we talk later?"

I saw the glow of headlights approaching from around a bend, so I dimmed the high beams by clicking the steel button on the floor with my left foot. A pickup truck swept around the bend, blinding me with his own high undimmed beams. I flicked mine to remind him, but his beams stayed on high as the truck flashed by, faded blue paint being the only thing that registered in my vision. For the next few minutes I had bright spots burned into my retinas by the glare of his lights. My thoughts were not charitable.

Finally, a tiny, twinkling cluster of lights appeared in the distance. A town. One with a vet's office and a gas station, I hoped. The fuel gauge was almost bottomed out. For a while the lights didn't seem to get any closer. They just vanished and reappeared as the terrain in between dictated. The DJ on the radio closed his show with an old Skip James song, one Skip recorded before the Depression sidelined him, and as the last guitar notes faded, the lights reappeared again out of the night. Definitely closer.

After a brief commercial, a new show began, blaring rock music. I quickly turned the radio off, wanting the blues magic feeling to stay. The Riviera coasted into town. Middle of the empty, black night.

Of course, everything was closed. No flashing neon signs pointing to a 24 hour veterinary office. So much for that plan. The lights I'd seen from so far away were now just a few yellowed bulbs trying to dispel the shadows around what seemed to be the only filling station in town, also closed. I rolled to a stop at the crosswalk in the only intersection in town. Out of habit, I looked left and right for cross traffic. I saw nothing. In the back seat, the dog sat up with a grunt, roused by the change in rhythm of the Riviera's momentum.

"Any ideas on which way to go?"

The dog yawned.

"Yeah, me too."

I eased the big car across the intersection and pulled into the gas station, stopping under the canopy next to the pumps. Even though the station was closed, the gas pumps were still operable with my ATM card. I got out and pulled the card out my pocket. Slipped it into the slot and pulled it out quickly. Tapped the buttons to enter my PIN, and selected the middle grade of gas. Flipped down the hinged rear license plate. Wedged the plate open. Stuck the nozzle in the fill tube and squeezed the handle, then flicked the tab down to lock the handle so I could let go. I listened to the fuel rushing down the fill spout into the tank, and smelled the fumes billowing into the cold night.

The dog's head was visible through the slope of the big back window. He was looking at something. My eyes followed his.

Across the street in a lot next to a small drug store, a dark car squatted in the shadow of an old one story brick building. A late model sedan, too generic to tell the make. Maybe an Acura. Maybe a Hyundai. In the front passenger's seat, the side of a guy's face was illuminated by a mobile phone screen as he talked. He looked at me across the street as I waited for the Riv's tank to fill. I looked back.

The tank in the Riv was pretty empty. It had consumed twenty gallons so far and was still swallowing fuel. The guy across the street disconnected from his call and his face went dark. Just a silhouette now. Make that two silhouettes. There was a guy in the driver seat too. The gas nozzle shut off with a thump. Twenty-three and a half gallons. I pulled the nozzle out. Screwed the cap back on and let the plate spring close. The guys across the street were out of the car and walking toward the gas station. I hung the nozzle back on the dispenser. Turned to face the two guys approaching the rear of the Riviera, hands in the pockets of their jackets.

"Nice car," the cell phone guy said. "Haven't seen one of those in years." Both guys were Asian. Chinese. Maybe Korean. Cell phone guy had no accent though. A lean little guy with longish hair and a wisp of a mustache. The other guy, the driver, could've been a brother.

"Been waiting long?" I asked.

The question made him lean a bit forward at the waist and cock his head, as if to hear me more clearly. "What's that?"

"I said, 'Been waiting long?'" I wanted them to keep coming closer.

"I don't know what you mean." They both stopped about ten feet away. Not close enough.

"Sure you do." I took a casual two steps toward them, like any normal person in a normal conversation does. "You were just telling somebody that I'm here, or rather, that the car is here." I moved another step toward them. "Now you're supposed to make sure it doesn't leave here, right?"

They stopped when I took the first two steps and now they each backed up two steps and spread out a little as the silent driver pulled a pistol out of his jacket.

"You think you're pretty smart, don't you?" said the first guy. Facing me, he was on the left, and the gunman was on the right with the gun in his right hand.

"I've just had a lot of time to think about it is all. You being here tells me this is some kind of big deal. Somebody wants this car, that's for damn sure. My guess is Pearl's son pissed off somebody in prison and to stay alive offered up the only thing he knew of that had any value—his mother's treasured car. You guys are part of some international car theft ring. A 1972 Buick Riviera in pristine condition is on somebody's check list, somebody with connections even in a Colorado state prison, and they are willing to pay out the nose for it, in dollars or lives. You've got to be one of maybe three or four teams in a wide area being directed by a central dispatcher. Whoever is in charge had to wait for me to commit to a general direction, then they needed time to get people in place on each of the routes I might take."

The guy seemed amused. "That's quite a plan. Why wait until now? Why not stop you sooner?"

I shrugged. "Pearl's son is dead. That's a given. And you already took out Pearl's first driver. Maybe there was a scene and your boss can't afford any more exposure by stealing the car there in town in broad daylight. There probably aren't many groups of Chinese nationals walking around Casper that aren't on a tour bus to Mt. Rushmore. You want a place and time more discreet, where there won't be a lot of witnesses, but you need a place where you can get a cell phone signal. Too far out in the boonies won't cut it. So here we are. My guess is you've only been here thirty minutes or so. An hour tops. Still, the two guys hiding behind the gas station must be pretty damn cold by now."

The guy actually smiled and called out in Chinese. After a moment I heard the scuffle of feet behind me. More than two pairs of feet. More than two guys.

"Not bad, old man, except there were four guys behind the station."

I allowed myself a deep sigh. Here we go. Again.

Was there some kind of sign on my back that read, "Gang up on me"? Why did it always seem to come down to this? And I wondered if asking myself these questions meant the lifestyle was getting tiresome? Was it time to hang it up, settle down? Was I indeed an old man?

I rolled my head on my neck, causing a couple of pops. Flexed my shoulders. Didn't feel old.

"Disparity of force," I said.

"What?"

"Disparity of force. Six on one. Means I'm justified in whatever I do to you."

He cocked his head. "And what's that going to be?"

I said nothing.

One of the guys behind me rattled off something in Chinese—Mandarin, I think. The spokesman leaned to look past me at the Riv. "Who's in there?" he asked.

"Nobody."

"I can see somebody moving."

The guy with the gun nodded toward the car with a sharp order. One set of feet behind me moved away. The car door opened.

A burst of savage barking punctuated by a gunshot made both guys in front of me jump, with their eyes locked on the car.

The short-twitch muscles in my legs fired and I lunged forward, angling toward the spokesman. He dodged behind the gunman, who was swinging the pistol to follow my feint. My right hand closed on the gun before it lined up with my body.

His finger reflexively jerked the trigger. The gun fired, the bullet passing behind my back. I jerked the weapon toward me, rotating it against his trigger finger as I did, forcing the gunman to his knees, breaking bones and tearing skin as I ripped the gun out of his hand.

Suddenly the guy who seemed to be the leader was exposed and my left hand flashed out for his neck. He tried to duck and twist and he was fast. It almost worked. I ended up with a fistful of his collar and used the grip to slam him to the ground.

I clubbed the skull of the other guy who was still on his hands and knees with the butt of the pistol. I hit him hard.

One down.

From the pavement the leader got his hands under him and drove a kick into the back of my left knee. The knee folded. I went to the ground with both of them. My left hand came down on one of the leader's knees. It was a good leverage point and I clamped down on it. My other hand dropped the gun and came across to grip his ankle. Wrenched it violently into the air. His knee snapped and he shrieked.

Two down.

Out of my peripheral vision I sensed motion more than seeing it. I rocked my head left and twisted my upper body as a tire iron bounced off the side of my right shoulder. I rolled away to the left over the writhing body of the guy with the shattered knee. The guy with the tire iron came after me, swinging it wildly, hitting his leader instead of me in his haste. The volume of the leader's screams amped way up. I grabbed him and dragged him up in front of me for a shield. Another brutal strike from the heavy steel bar made him go limp. My right arm was throbbing from the impact of the tire iron on my shoulder, glancing though it was. There was damage, some kind of serious damage, and I was having trouble holding the guy up.

Bludgeoning his leader didn't slow the guy with the tire iron one bit. I'd misread the hierarchy. Usually the guy doing the most talking is the one in charge. I'd assumed the spokesman was the leader. He wasn't. The guy on the ground, the one I'd clubbed with his own pistol, must be the leader.

The guy with the tire iron kept flailing at me, the strikes from the iron impacting my human shield with dull meaty thuds. The three others circled me. The tire iron came down again and I managed to grab the guy's wrist. With my left arm, I flipped the limp body of the spokesman at the other three guys and tore the tire iron away from the guy in front of me. I backhanded him across the face with it. Blood and teeth sprayed into the dark.

Three down.

I heard the discharge of a Taser and felt the jolt in the same moment. For a millisecond, the force of the electrical charge made me think the remaining three guys had hit me from behind all at once. Made me drop the tire iron.

One man in a hundred can take a Taser hit and still function, especially if the one man being Tased has been Tased in training and knows he can fight through it. I am one of those men.

Instead of going down, I turned. The three guys started backing up. The shiny silver wires connecting me to the stun gun sagged to the ground. The guy triggered the unit again. The jolt hit me and it felt like I'd been kicked by a mule. I grabbed the wire leads and ripped them free.

I have to give the last three guys credit. They didn't quit. They circled me, darting, stopping, moving again. No matter how much I swiveled my head, I could only see one of them at a time, and at some signal I couldn't see, they moved in on me, fast, like three cobras.

I stepped forward to meet the one in front of me. He was already committed. No time to change his plan. He was rotating through some kind of roundhouse kick at my head that I blocked with my left forearm. I trapped the leg under my arm as he kicked up his other leg trying to spin out of my grip while aiming a new kick at my head. I ducked under it with the help of a kick to the back of my skull from one of the other guys. I was already turning to my left, bringing the guy whose leg I had a hold of with me. He was completely out of contact with the ground by now as I spun faster and slammed him against the next guy. They went down but they wouldn't stay there, that was for damn sure.

I left them to focus on the one who had kicked me in the back of the head. I knew one of these three guys had a gun because he'd fired it at the dog a few moments earlier. Sure enough, when I turned, there it was in this sixth guy's grip, and now that the other two were momentarily out of the way, it was being raised. I was still turning and I dropped as he fired. I kicked out a leg as I pivoted in a low crouch and swept his legs from under him, and decided enough was enough.

I stayed low and as he hit the ground, I struck him in the throat with the edge of my palm. Hard as I could. Game over. Done. If my hand was a blade, it would've sheared clean through his neck and sent his head spinning off.

Four down.

I twisted back in time to literally catch another guy as he lunged at me from a few feet away. I carried him on over me as I crouched and drove him head first into the ground next to his dying friend.

Five down.

I scooped up the pistol dropped by the fourth guy. A Glock, model and caliber unsure at that moment. Turned and found the last guy running for their car across the street. I lined up the front sight on his spine and fired. He went down in the middle of the street, a tangle of arms and legs tumbling to a stop on the dashed white line.

Glock 21. The full-size .45 caliber model.

Six down.


	6. Chapter 6: Reacher

Slowly I pushed myself fully upright, breathing hard, right shoulder still throbbing. I shrugged it the way I had at the start of the fight. A knife of pain stabbed at the joint. I raised the arm and rotated it carefully. It still functioned, but it hurt. Hurt a lot. Felt like something might be broken in there. Damaged, but working, at least until my adrenaline level went down and the swelling increased. Then the real pain would introduce itself.

The guy whose throat I'd crushed was still and quiet. He was dead, no doubt about it. The guy who got the pile driver treatment lay next to him, his head turned at an impossible angle on his neck. I walked out to where the sixth guy lay on the white line in the middle of the street. He was dead too.

The two guys I'd hit with the tire iron and the pistol were semi-conscious, little twitches and moans and gasps letting me know I had nothing to worry about from them.

The first guy—the spokesman—was the only one still what you might call coherent. He was curled on his side clutching his knee and swearing in Mandarin between sobs of pain, his face contorted and streaked with tears and mud and grease from writhing on the dirty gas station apron.

I tucked one Glock into my waistband at the small of my back, being careful to avoid anything that might press against the trigger. Went through the pockets of the other five. No ID, nothing to give me any clues to who they were. Two of them had money, maybe eighty bucks total. I took that. Picked up the other pistol I'd dropped to break the first guy's knee. Another Glock, the 9mm G17.

I walked over to the guy with the ruined knee. Put my shoe on the joint and ground it into the pavement like I was stubbing out a cigarette. He screamed and struck out feebly at my leg, slobbering and sobbing. I eased the pressure on his knee a little.

"That was to get your attention," I said.

He spat on my pant leg and spouted a string of invective that no doubt included a scathing review of my ancestry clear back to the very first Reacher, whenever and whoever that was. I had no idea.

I twisted my shoe down harder on his knee. Harder and longer. He cried and squirmed and tried to jerk his knee out from under my shoe, which probably made it hurt even more.

I eased up again. He lay there, panting and sniffling.

"Is there a truck coming here to pick up the car?" I asked him. "Or were you supposed to drive it somewhere?"

After a few moments he pulled himself together enough to answer.

"It's coming here," he gasped. "They didn't want to chance…drawing attention from the state police by loading the car down near the interstate. We were just supposed to keep it here."

"How is that working out for you?"

He cursed at me in Mandarin and spat again. "It will be here any time now. It was already near the interstate exit. It's been driving west from Denver all day. I hope you're still here when it comes."

He was getting some of his nerve back.

"Where was the car supposed to end up?" I said.

He didn't answer. I leaned forward and let the weight on my foot increase.

More frantic Mandarin, then English. " _Okay!_ Okay! It was heading for the Port of Los Angeles, then into a shipping container to Hong Kong."

"Who wants it?"

More hesitation. I pushed down harder. He screamed and slapped the greasy cement like a wrestler trying to tap out when he's been pinned by his opponent.

"I don't _know_ who wants it!" he grimaced. "The buyer is part of a syndicate. It could be any of a half dozen members."

"And this syndicate has members in prison in Denver?"

He nodded. "In all the big cities."

I left him laying there and walked to where the car still waited next to the pump island, driver side door still hanging open.

I looked inside. No dog. A bullet hole puckered the leather panel above the rear arm rest on the passenger side.

Shit.

I set the G17 in the middle of the front seat. Walked around the back of the car to the passenger side. Squatted down to look. Sure enough, a ragged exit hole looking like a miniature volcano marred the sleek finish behind the door on that side, about eighteen inches above the pavement. I carefully felt the jagged edges of the penetration. I didn't know much about auto body repair, but I figured this exit hole in the metal would be easier to fix than the entrance hole in the leather panel.

A quiet rustle from the shadows brought me to my feet. The dog came slinking slowly out of the shadows at the side of the gas station building. Head held low, eyes averted. His tail tucked between his legs. He moved as if he expected a beating, but he came toward me anyway.

I squatted back down, held out my hand. "It's okay, boy. You did good. Good boy. Come here." He got close enough and I rubbed his bony head and fiddled with his long droopy ears a little. Most of his tail stayed tucked, but the very tip of it appeared and wagged, barely. Like he was testing my response.

"Good boy," I told him. "You barked at just right time." Reassured he drew closer and let me look him over for any new wounds. The touch of my hands made him flinch, but his tail was wagging a little more confidently. I didn't find anything beyond the abrasion on his hip that had been there already. I rubbed his head some more. "There you go. Good boy."

His head lifted and his ears twitched, alert to a new sound. Faint, but growing. The growl of a big diesel engine laboring up a grade.

I walked back out into the street. Stopped next to the body of the guy I shot. The sound of the diesel was coming from south of town.

I walked back to the spokesman. Bent down and grabbed a handful of his shirt and dragged him back to the dead guy, He cried out and cursed and flailed, but there wasn't anything he could do. I dropped him next to the dead guy. Walked back and took an arm of each of the other two dead guys, the one with the broken neck and the one with the crushed throat. Dragged them over and left them on top of the other dead guy and the spokesman with the ruined knee.

"What're you doing? Get these guys off me!" I turned back and lifted my foot as if to jam it down into the stack of bodies toward his knee.

He waved a hand from under the pile. " _Okay!_ Okay! I'm good, it's good!"

The sound of the approaching diesel grew. I went over and got the other two guys who weren't quite dead. Dragged them both to the middle of the street. Added them to the pile. The spokesman groaned at the added weight, but didn't say anything more.

I stepped back, examining my work with a critical eye. Rearranged the bodies to make the stack higher. You can get a decent pile when you're working with a half a dozen limp bodies.

"What are you doing? Are you crazy?" said the guy on the bottom.

The diesel sound was loud now. Beyond the crest of the road leading into town, the glow of headlights grew stronger. Off to the east, the sky was lightening, Dawn wasn't far away.

I stood next to the pile of bodies. Reached behind my back and pulled out the full-size .45 Glock. Held it at my side. Made sure that it was turned so there would be no mistake as to what I held.

Spread my feet shoulder-width apart, and waited.


	7. Chapter 7: Reacher

It was a big commercial tow truck. The flatbed type that carried the car instead of towing it. It crept over the top of the grade at the end of the town's main street, then leveled out, the headlights coming down to find me standing next to my stack of carjackers. Fifty yards separated me from the truck. It kept moving forward at the same slow rate of speed it used crawling up the grade south of town, creeping along between the old brick store fronts lining both sides of the street, until it covered about half the distance between us, then it jerked to a stop with an abrupt groan of brakes. It sat, the motor idling with a diesel knock.

I tried to imagine what the driver was seeing, having no idea what had taken place here.

The Riv parked at the pumps in a gas station. A mound of inert bodies heaped on the centerline of the street. A huge, scruffy white man with a gun standing next to them. A big, rust-colored hound dog sitting off to one side, watching.

I'm a fan of the three second reaction rule. The brain on average needs one second to see something, to absorb the image. It needs another second to comprehend what it is seeing. A third second to confirm.

My three seconds started when the the truck stopped. When the third second ticked off, I started walking toward it. Big, confident strides forward. Not meant to appear in any kind of hurry, but in reality covering a lot of ground with each step. I gave myself another three seconds and raised the Glock just as the driver lit me up with the beam from the spotlight mounted on the pillar of the windshield.

Without stopping, I squeezed off one round and blew the spotlight off its mount in a small explosion of sparks. The ricochet whined off into the dim sky over the town as the pieces of the metal spotlight housing clattered to the ground next to the cab. I kept walking. Closing the distance.

Shooting out the light seemed to convince the driver any further action on his part would not be in his best interest. I made it to the driver's side of the truck. The emblem of a well-known automobile insurance company was emblazoned on the door of the cab. I reached up for the chrome handle and yanked open the door, muzzle of the Glock covering whoever it found inside.

All the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place. I knew the truth about Pearl, and I knew the truth about the car and why I'd driven around Casper for an hour and hadn't picked up a tail.

"Hello, Ron," I said to the driver. "Or whatever your name is."

He was dressed in a different uniform than he wore in the diner; a dark jacket, gray work pants, with the same Peterbilt cap on his head. He leaned away from the open door, a mix of contrition, exasperation, and fear on his face. Hands held up in surrender.

"Please…Reacher...it's Jack Reacher, right? Can you just point that thing somewhere else?"

"No. Carefully reach down and shut off the motor." He did. "Get down from there. Hands where I can see them." He did that too.

"So somebody lifted my prints off my coffee cup and silverware back at the diner? I have to tell you, Ron…may I call you 'Ron'?...that was a hell of an acting job yesterday. Are you with the FBI or the Colorado Attorney General's office?"

"Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, actually," he said sullenly.

"Yet here you are in Colorado."

He shrugged. "It's a joint Federal and multi-state task force. You can guess what that means."

"This is some kind of big deal."

"Very big. This car is connected to a much wider range of international smuggling activity. Not just goods. Drugs. Illegal arms. People too. Human trafficking."

"But somebody got careless, said the wrong thing to somebody. Let me guess. It was Pearl's son. That's why he dropped out of sight. He's either dead, or he's hiding because he doesn't want to _be_ dead."

"That's what we assume. And that wasn't acting, back there at the diner. We've been working this particular smuggling ring for two years and the Riviera was the last vehicle we needed moved across state lines by the Denver crew to complete the investigation. The whole enterprise, not just the car smuggling side-all of it. We had everything and everybody in place. This was going to be it. You were close to me calling in backup, blowing my cover, and sending us back to square one."

"So something happened," I said. "In spite of your surveillance, Pearl's son was taken out of play unexpectedly, and the driver he hired didn't show. You had to improvise. You had to cause a distraction with the omelet and buy a little time until you knew why Pearl's son or his driver weren't coming. Assets had to be shifted around, people put in other places. None of this with any involvement from Pearl. She had no idea what was going on."

"We didn't know who the driver was going to be. Whether it was Pearl's son or somebody brought in by the smugglers.

"So in fact, I actually bought you some extra time with my interference," I said. "You should be thanking me."

"What you bought was a trip to jail with your involvement here tonight. Are any of these guys still alive?"

The guy at the bottom of the pile cried, " _Me!_ I'm still alive! That guy is crazy!"

"Whose truck is this?" I asked.

"It's an FBI truck branded to look like a commercial tow."

"How much do you suppose these tires cost?"

"How should I know?"

I shifted the Glock away from him and shot the outside rear tire of the truck. Ron jumped at the twin explosions of the muzzle blast and the tire bursting. Air hissed out of the tire.

"I'm figuring about $700 per. I wonder if they'll dock your pay?"

The guy under the pile called out, _"See?"_

I shot out the front tire. "Oops. There's another $700." The truck began to settle toward the front driver's side. Ron stood helplessly. Watching. His hands still in the air.

From the cockpit, a radio broke squelch and a garbled voice asked a question. I stepped to the door of the cab and put a bullet through the front of the radio too.

"Geez, mister, come on! What's the point of all this?"

"The point is you used an innocent elderly woman as bait in your sting. You used me. Let me drive all over Casper to see if I could draw any of the crew out, but they were smart enough to know something was wrong. Smart enough to wait and let me get somewhere else before they moved. You were part of a team who flew to Denver to hijack the hijacker's tow truck. The guy at the bottom of this pile," I indicated the stack of bodies with a nod of my head, "told me he hoped I would still be here when the truck showed up, meaning he was expecting a lot of reinforcements. You don't qualify, meaning whoever was in this truck is detained somewhere until they can be charged."

I climbed up into the truck's cab. There was no center console, so I checked the glove box. Finding nothing but paperwork, I reached down and felt under the driver's seat. Pulled out a pistol, a 9mm Sig Sauer P226. I hoisted myself out of the seat and back down to the ground. Turned to walk back to the Riv.

"Ron, you make sure these guys get the proper treatment, okay?"

"Where are you going?"

"I've got a car to deliver to California. I figure Pearl does indeed have a daughter who is expecting this car."

"Wait," said Ron. "I was told to give you this if I saw you."

I stopped and looked back. He was holding out a piece of paper in his hand. I stepped back and took it from him. It was an envelope. On the front of the envelope, penned in a strong hand, were two words.

 _Jack Reacher_

"What is this?"

Ron shrugged. "I was told to give it to you. That's all I know."

I tore it open. It was a note. It read:

 _I knew your father, Captain Stan Reacher._

It was signed, _Walt Longmire, Sheriff, Absaroka County, WY_


	8. Chapter 8: Reacher

"Who gave you this?" I asked again.

"That guy, the guy who signed it."

"No instructions?"

He shrugged. Shook his head.

I thumbed the magazine release on the Sig. Caught the mag left-handed as it dropped from the grip of the pistol. Tossed the mag under the truck. Racked the slide and ejected the round in the chamber. Caught that too. Handed the useless pistol back to Ron.

"You can't leave!" he said as I turned back toward the Riviera.

"Watch me," I said without looking back.

The dog hoisted himself to his feet as I approached. Tail wagging. I patted my leg as I walked past, and he fell in beside me. Just as we got to the car, a truck came around the corner at the other end of the main street. A faded blue pickup. The same one I saw when I entered town thirty minutes before. High beams still blazing, but softened by the growing light of the new day.

How could a town so small be so busy so early in the morning?

I got to the car and noticed the dog had stopped. He was watching the truck. His tail no longer wagged. It was tucked down between his legs.

The truck pulled into the filling station behind the Riv, gravel crunching and popping under its tires. An older man, older than me, in a thick brown coat of some kind, wearing jeans and a cowboy hat got out. He went to the back of his truck and opened the tailgate. Turned back toward the dog and me. He was tall with a lean build. His head was thrust forward at the end of his neck as if it was in a contest with the rest of his body and had to be first to get wherever he was going. He walked like he owned the gas station and the town around it. Maybe he did. His boot heels grated on the gravel as he approached.

"That's my dog," he said. Patted his denim pant leg. " _Duke!_ Come here!" His voice was harsh.

"I found this dog on the side of the road, miles from here."

"Stupid shithead fell out of the back of my truck on up the highway, probably on a curve. _Duke!_ Come on!"

Duke was crouched on his belly on the filling station's oil-stained concrete apron. Cringing. Head down. Eyes averted.

" _Duke!_ Git in the truck!" The cowboy gestured toward the open tailgate with a sharp wave of his hand.

Duke didn't move, other than to start shivering again.

 _"_ _Duke!"_

"He doesn't want to go with you."

"I don't give a rat's ass what he wants or doesn't want. He's a dog. And it's none of your damned business." He peered down the street to where the tow truck squatted in the street. Looked at the stack of bodies, and at Ron who still stood next to the disabled truck.

Ron shrugged.

The old cowboy turned back to the matters at hand. "I don't know what the hell is going on here, but this is my dog and I'm taking him."

"Tell you what," I said. "I'll buy him from you."

"He ain't for sale."

"I'll give you a hundred bucks for him."

"Are you _deaf,_ or just stupid? I said he ain't for _sale!_ "

"Two hundred."

"Well, that answers my question. Anybody that would pay two hundred dollars for that worthless piece of shit must have shit for brains. I told you, he ain't for sale.

"He doesn't want to go with you," I repeated.

The old cowboy snorted in derision. Walked forward to the dog and bent over. Grabbed the loose skin on the back of the dog's neck. Twisted his fist to take up the slack. Started to drag him toward the truck. Duke followed along, whining. In real pain from the relentless grip of the cowboy's hand, but the old man didn't ease up. In fact he pulled harder, as if trying to lift the forequarters of the dog off the ground. Duke gave out a sharp yelp.

I stepped forward and grabbed the guy's upper arm. He stopped. Not like he had any choice.

"Let's let the dog decide which one of us he goes with."

"Hell with _that!_ " he cried. "This is _my_ dog!"

"Like I said, let's leave it up to him."

He tried to shake loose of my hold on his arm. Made him more angry when he couldn't. "This is _my dog!"_

I stared into his face. Our noses were only inches apart by now. I said, "Let. Him. Go."

The old man released his grip on the dog's scruff. I released the old man.

I pointed toward his truck. "Go over there."

"This is my dog." Not quite as much conviction this time.

"Go."

He went back and stood beside his truck. "This is bullshit, that's my dog."

I backed up an equal distance, leaving Duke between us.

"Call him," I said.

" _Duke!_ You come on and git in this truck! Come on!" He slapped his thigh. _"Come on!"_

"Duke," I said. "You don't have to go with him." I crouched down. Held out my hand. "Come here, boy."

Duke was looking back and forth, clearly confused.

"Come on, Duke," I said.

" _Duke!_ Git in the _truck!_ "

Duke cringed lower. Moved an agonizingly slow inch. Jowls almost dragging on the cement. Toward the truck.

"Come _on_ , you worthless son of a _bitch_ , move your lazy ass! _Git!_ "

The old cowboy's tirade tore at Duke like physical blows. He flinched and twitched. Old body jerking as if he was being kicked. He seemed to shrink back even as he crept closer to the truck.

"Duke," I said. Calmly. No threat in my voice. Still crouched down with my hand out. "Come with me. You can ride in a warm car."

Duke couldn't understand my words, but he understood my tone, my body language. He paused his crawl and looked back toward me with imploring eyes. Like he was apologizing.

" _Damn it_ , Duke, I'm gonna _whip_ your mangy hide!" The cowboy moved a step toward the dog with a stomp of his boot for emphasis. _"Git!_ "

The stomp broke Duke's will. He dodged to the side around the cowboy, circling to the back of the truck. He tried to jump in but only got his front legs onto the tail gate. Hung there as his hind legs scrabbled and scraped for something to boost him the rest of the way.

"Oh, you piece of _shit!_ " the cowboy said as he walked to the back of the truck and with the pointed toe of his cowboy boot kicked the dog's hind end, propelling him the rest of the way into the ribbed truck bed. Duke howled with the repeated _ki-yi_ of an injured dog, painfully shrill in the quiet morning.

The old cowboy turned back toward me, speaking as he turned. "See? I _told_ you h—"

I hit him with a head butt. Hardest I ever wanted to hit someone. It was very satisfying. His cowboy hat somersaulted into the air as he went over backwards against the side of his truck bed, rolling along it before crumpling face down on the stained pavement.

I glared back up the street at Ron. He raised his hands as if to say, _Hey, no problem here_.

Duke was standing in the truck bed. Front feet on the wheel well, looking over the side at his owner on the ground. Tail wagging.

I took a dollar out of my pocket. Stuffed in the cowboy's slack mouth.

"I'm buying your dog. Nod if you've got a problem with that."

No nod.

I walked around to the tailgate. Duke came to meet me. No cringing. Tail wagging. I scooped him against my chest and set him down on the concrete.

I went to the Riv and opened the door. Folded the driver's seat forward. Duke jumped into the back seat with no prompting, like he'd been chauffeured around in Rivieras all his life.

Before getting in the car, I paused. One hand on the roof. One hand on the driver's door. I surveyed my work. The tow truck blocked half of the street like a beached whale. Ron had wandered off somewhere. The pile of carjackers was moving a little, like it was breathing. The guy on the bottom seemed to be trying to extricate himself.

The sky over the ridges to the east glowed with the approach of the morning sun. The town would be waking up soon. People would be making calls about the spectacle on their main street.

Time to go.

But not to California.

Not yet.


	9. Chapter 9: Reacher

I pulled the Riv into the parking lot of the same diner in Casper the next morning. It was colder than it had been two mornings before. An icy wind scattered random dry leaves across the parking lot, and a low cloud ceiling threatened snow. Only three other cars took up slots on the weathered asphalt. The big Riviera would be like a neon sign. That was okay. I wanted it to be seen. Big and green and obvious. Here I am. I parked it in the same spot Pearl's Corolla had occupied.

I left Duke in the car. I didn't think overheating would be any kind of issue. Cracked the windows down an inch to let in fresh air. Took the Glock 21 with me in a coat pocket. I felt like having big bullets.

I walked into the diner. Turned right past the booth where Pearl had been twisting her napkin two days ago. Took a seat in my corner booth, facing into the room. There were two coffee cups on my table, just like before. The same waitress came through the door from the kitchen and stopped in her tracks when she saw me. Blinked twice and turned around and went back into the kitchen.

I waited. She was gone for several minutes, no doubt on the phone starting a process. Somebody had given her a number and said call if the big guy shows up again. The door from the kitchen opened and she reappeared. Picked up a bronze colored decanter and took it to the coffee machine and began to fill it. She stole a quick glance at me over her shoulder. Finished filling the decanter. Came around the end of the counter and approached my booth. Carefully. Apprehensively even.

I smiled at her.

"Don't worry, I'm not here to cause any trouble," I said. "And it's okay that you called whoever you called. They need to know I'm here."

"Okay," she said. Still doubtful.

"How about we start with coffee," I said. I nudged the mug in front of me toward her. It seemed to break the ice. Words poured out of her as steaming coffee poured into the mug.

"After you left with Pearl the other morning, this place went crazy! Two black cars pulled up out in front and all these guys in suits came in, asking questions about who you were and if I'd touched any of your dishes and if I knew where you'd come from and where you stayed and all kinds of stuff! They flipped the 'CLOSED' sign around and asked the rest of the customers to take their food in to-go boxes. Most of them were already leaving anyway."

She sat down across the booth from me and leaned in conspiratorially. Lowered her voice as she looked over her shoulder. "Then a big gray van pulled in and more guys got out, wearing, like, coveralls and gloves and stuff! They came in and bagged your dishes and dusted the table for fingerprints and made a big mess! I told them they should get that crazy truck drivers' fingerprints, not yours! They didn't care about him though, they were all about you. Once they were done talking to me, I got sent home for the rest of the day. Yesterday too. Today is my first shift since then."

"I'm sorry you got caught up in all of this. It's got nothing to do with you, or even with me. I'm caught up in it, same as you. This is about Pearl's car out there, and Pearl's son."

She gasped. "My mom went to school with him! She said he was always in trouble!"

I ignored the tangent. "Did a sheriff come in and talk to you while you were here?"

"A sheriff? There were a lot of guys asking questions, but no sheriff." Her eyes went to the window. "It looks like there's one pulling in now though."

I followed her glance. A gray pick up truck—might've been silver—with a light bar on the top stopped in the opposite slot to the Riviera, nose-to-nose. There was a big, six point gold star decal on the door. It said _Absaroka County_ _Sheriff's Department_.

Both of the truck's doors opened and two people, a woman and a man, climbed out. The woman was the driver. Blue denim jeans, gray uniform shirt, brown jacket with star patches on the shoulders. Tactical boots, no hat. Very trim figure. Dark hair to her shoulders with what looked to be some natural wave. She wore aviator style sunglasses. Moved with deliberation. No unsure motions of her hands, no subconscious touching of the gear on her belt.

She stepped closer to the Riv. Looking it over. Inside the car, Duke had somehow clambered into the front seat and was watching her. His long ears flapped as his head turned to watch her and the man as he joined her.

The man was at least as tall as me. Just as big, with a bit of the added flesh of an older man around the middle, but not much. Not much at all. Gray cowboy hat, sweat-stained and worn. Jacket, brown, but not part of a uniform. Denim shirt underneath. Also in blue jeans, but with battered cowboy boots. No spurs.

They were having a conversation about the car. The woman pointed at the bullet hole in the quarter panel and glanced over her shoulder at the diner. The man had his hands on his hips, leaning on one leg. Nodding his head to whatever she was saying. Reached out with a boot toe and lightly kicked the front tire, as if he was testing it before deciding whether to buy the Riv or not.

I watched as Duke's muzzle went back and forth between them, like he was taking in a tennis match. He put his nose up to the top of the window glass where I'd lowered it to let in fresh air, and the man put his fingers in the opening to let Duke smell them. My eyes caught movement in the cab of the sheriff's truck. A third head had appeared. Not human. They had a dog of their own in the truck. I assumed it was a dog at least. Judging by the size of its head, it could've been a bear. Duke noticed it at the same time and lost interest in the man's fingers. He watched the other dog. The other dog watched him back.

The man and woman both turned together. Consensus reached. They began to walk toward the diner. At first I was a little confused. The note I had been given indicated the sheriff's name was _Walt Longmire_ , but as the driver, the woman had the edge for the lead position. The gear on her belt was another indicator. It was well-ordered. Nothing unnecessary, but nothing missing. Everything in its place. Professional. The man's appearance was more casual. He didn't seem to have any gear at all. I caught a glimpse of a gun holstered on his belt under his jacket, but nothing more.

But watching them walk toward the diner, it became clear which one was which. His bearing said it all. He was in charge. She dropped back a half step behind him as they strode forward, but not like some kind of underling. It was a tactical move. Her head was swiveling, eyes probing the rest of the parking lot from behind the sunglasses.

Therefore, she was the first to see another car arrive on the scene.

A word from her alerted the sheriff. He turned as the black car barreled into the lot. He stepped into the lane. Held up his hand, palm toward the new car. It was a Crown Vic, obviously belonging to a government agency of some sort. Antennae bristled from the lid of the trunk.

The car stopped just short of the sheriff, the back end rising with the momentum of an abrupt halt. The sheriff walked around to the driver's window, which buzzed down. He put a hand on the sill and leaned down to talk to the driver. The driver looked from him toward the diner and back. Did it again. Gestured in frustration or protest. The sheriff said nothing. Just looked at the driver. The driver looked back. A battle of wills. Finally the driver made a show of surrender with one hand. The sheriff patted the door frame twice. Stepped back from the car and it proceeded, turning into the closest row where it drove halfway down to an empty stall and parked. Nobody got out.

The sheriff and his deputy continued their walk to the diner. The deputy was still wearing her aviator sunglasses, but the sheriff wore no sunglasses. I was able to see his eyes. They were focused through the plate glass window of the diner.

Focused on me.


	10. Chapter 10: Walt

**Walt**

 _48 hours earlier._

Ruby gets the credit. She was smart enough, as she always is, to immediately realize that the Absaroka County Sheriff's Department would be revolutionized by a simple procedural change made possible by the single most important invention of the 20th century.

It could be argued that the telephone, with its many iterations, is that invention. Not so. Surely television, you cry. Nope. The automobile? Hardly. Radio, computers, the internet? Don't waste my time.

In the mid-70s, two researchers at 3M got together. One had created a low-tack adhesive, so low in fact that he couldn't get anyone in the company interested in marketing it. The other researcher kept losing his place in his hymnal on Sunday mornings in church. The two gentlemen collaborated and after a couple of false starts, in 1980 they released the product of the century: the Post-it.

Lucian was still sheriff at that point. The protocol for messages between he and Ruby had always been face-to-face, or, in lieu of physical presence, the office intercom, which at that time consisted of one or the other of them yelling loudly from their desks through the open door of Lucian's office. Last on the list of official communication was a note left on Lucian's desk, or his chair, or in one extreme case, stapled to the brim of his Caribou colored Open Road Royal Deluxe Stetson. That was as close as Ruby had ever come to being fired, which wasn't really very close, but let it be noted Lucian was more upset at having staple holes in his hat than he was about having his leg shot off by a Basque bootlegger.

At any rate, after enduring the profanity-laced tirade resulting from the desecration of his lid, Ruby gave Lucian the silent treatment for a week. She didn't talk to him, nor would she cross the threshold of his office to leave any form of correspondence with the outside world. She relied on anybody else in the office, basically me, to relay verbal or handwritten messages to him. At the end of the week she came in with four little cellophane-wrapped bricks of yellow paper notepads, and the next day, Lucian came in to find his office door papered with notes about calls he needed to return, about complaints to be investigated, and that the chicken pot pies in the freezer were gone. Thus began the state-of-the-art system that persists to this day.

Fast forward to the present. The FBI had been investigating a prison smuggling operation that encompassed penitentiaries in a handful of Western states. The hub of this smuggling ring seemed to be the Englewood Federal Correctional Institution near Denver. Along with the governments in neighboring states, the Wyoming Attorney General's office and the Department of Criminal Investigation were cooperating with the ongoing Federal investigation, and all Wyoming county sheriff's departments received weekly related updates that might impact their respective counties. Absaroka County had a slight distinction in this regard in that one of the preferred smuggling routes to Canada from the Denver Metro area ran north on Interstate 25, close enough to Durant that the sounds of 18 wheelers laboring up the slight grade past the high school south of town sometimes carried through my office window when it was open, which at the time it was not, what with it being winter, a season in which heat should stay indoors where it does the most good.

For two years, the only things the investigation had produced were three hanging files full of printed reports that took up space in one of the filing cabinets in the corner of my office. That afternoon, however, when Dog and I returned to the office from having lunch at the Busy Bee, Ruby made a point to mention a Post-it stuck to my door frame regarding a new development. It wasn't hard to find; it was the only Post-it there, a small, lonely yellow square right at eye-level. Evil doing in Absaroka County can be glacially slow during the winter. Literally.

I peeled it off the door and continued into my office, shedding my sheepskin coat to hang on the wall hook as I went. I eased into my desk chair and put my hat crown down on the desk to pick up the latest report, a thicker report than the usual two or three pages.

One facet of the smuggling operation involved vehicles, most of the vehicles being hard-to-find, older models. According to the new report, it seemed that of all the evidence collected so far in this investigation, nothing had been damning enough to take down the leaders of the operation.

Until now.

A 1972 Buick Riviera was going to be stolen and moved from Casper to Hong Kong. It might be transported into Canada and shipped from Vancouver, it might be taken to one of the US Pacific Coast ports, it might end up in Mexico; it wasn't known at this point what route would be used to get the car out of the country. The important thing was to allow the car to be taken possession of by the smugglers so the FBI could apprehend them with the vehicle. It seemed like such a minor thing for everything to hinge on after a two year, multi-million dollar effort, but sometimes the world turned on minor things. For all his misdeeds—bootlegging, smuggling alcohol, murder, etc.—Al Capone was finally jailed for simple tax evasion, so who was I, Walter Longmire, sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in the country, to question the process of justice?

The report listed Interstate 25 through Absaroka County as a possible route north for the car to be taken. That wasn't news; virtually every report cited that possibility. Why anybody would want to use that route in the dead of winter was another debate.

A sting operation had been initiated in Casper to lure the smugglers into taking possession of the car. An undercover FBI driver would move the car out of Casper and allow himself to be stopped by the smugglers in a dangerous attempt to entrap them with possession; dangerous because the driver would be at risk during the carjacking. The sting had fallen apart right away when the FBI driver disappeared before he was even able to take possession of the car himself. The sting took a new twist with the intervention of an unknown person as the new driver.

At the first opportunity, fingerprints and DNA samples were collected from a coffee cup and utensils used by this new driver. The fingerprints were processed in a mobile lab and an identity for the new driver was rendered almost immediately. Beyond that identity, however, the trail was scant. But that didn't matter, because the identity of the new driver leaped off the page at me.

Last name, Reacher. First name, Jack.

 _Reacher._ Seeing the name in the report sort of pushed me back in my chair. It was completely out of context; a name from another life.

Of course, it was possible that this Reacher was unrelated to that other Reacher in that other life, but as I read on down the page, the connection became clear. Jack Reacher's father had indeed been Stan Reacher, a United States Marine Corps captain, deployed for a brief time in 1968 to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Vietnam.

There was a picture of Reacher the son included in the report; a color portrait. He was wearing the uniform and hat of a Major in the United States Army. How did the son of a USMC captain end up in the Army? Kids these days. There was a definite resemblance to Reacher the father, especially around the eyes and jawline. Son Reacher had a fruit salad full of ribbons on his chest signifying medals he'd been awarded, including a Bronze Star and two Silvers. There was a military police pin on his lapel, and another that marked him as a member of a division unknown to me, the 110th SIU; Special Investigations Unit. Interesting.

The report was less than thirty minutes old. As of this morning, Reacher had possession of the Riviera. Was he working with the smuggling ring? That didn't seem likely, given his military record. Did he stumble into the sting by accident? Nobody knew.

My undersheriff, Vic, came into my office. She plopped into one of my chairs and hiked her Browning tactical boots up onto my desktop. She nodded her chin at the report in my hands. "So, what, do you think the Feebs are going to keep surveillance on this Reacher guy until something more develops? Why didn't they just arrest his ass as soon as he left with the car?"

"I suspect there's something else in play, or they would've detained him by now." I liked to say when I suspected something. It felt very investigative. "Maybe his military record has them second guessing themselves." I suddenly came to a decision. I pushed up out of my chair, not without a few protests from various body parts and regions and reached for my jacket.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going down to Casper and talk to some of the people who were there. Particularly the agent in the diner. Maybe the server too."

I watched hope unfurl across her face like a flag in a sudden breeze. "Please, _please,_ take me with you! Everybody in town is hibernating or something. I'm going bat-shit crazy here. Everything is caught up, and there's nothing to do. Sancho can handle things here if something comes up." She was right. The Basquo was as capable as both of us put together.

"I suppose you'll insist on driving?"

"Don't you think that's probably the way to go since you haven't been cleared by Isaac for driving anyway?"

"I drive all the time!"

We were still in an awkward, tense standoff about my health status after Mexico and the subsequent recovery, which was ongoing. If I'm being honest, it wasn't just Vic. Ruby and Cady had joined her in a campaign to minimize any sort of activities that might aggravate my injuries, such as walking down to the Busy Bee, bending over from the waist, or turning my head too fast, although I noticed the task of babysitting my granddaughter Lola didn't seem to concern anybody, which was good because my foot would go down hard if that privilege was curtailed.

"Driving between your cabin and the jail is just a _little_ different than a two hour bob-sled run down the damn interstate."

"Fine, you can drive. But I get to work the radio."

Her boots dropped from the desktop and she bounced up out of the chair. "I'll get my jacket."

Dog followed her and I resigned myself to the both of them escorting me. As I shrugged into my sheepskin, I pondered the difference in my mindset; before Mexico, it would've been natural for the three of us to make this jaunt together. Now I felt a little resentful, like I needed to have my hand held as if I was a child who might run into traffic if left to his own devices. Speaking my mind on the subject, however, would likely result in mutiny. When did sheriffing get so complicated?

Casper was less than a two hour drive south from Durant, and as we drove, we gave every vehicle coming north on the other side of the interstate a good look. It was entirely possible that we might see the Riviera being driven or more likely trailered on its way to a clandestine Canadian border crossing. Vic liked that possibility. "A high-speed pursuit would be outstanding. Anything to get my blood pumping."

I hoped to get to Casper while the some of the players were still in place. On the way down, I used Vic's cell phone to talk to T. J. Sherwin, the head of DCI's lab unit. "T.J., are you in the loop on this smuggling sting the FBI is running in Casper?"

"Walter, do you think we would've gotten an ID on those prints so fast if I wasn't? I'll have DNA by tomorrow if that's not good enough."

From the driver seat of the Bullet, Vic heard T.J.'s answer and swore. "It always takes us eight or nine months to get DNA back, but this you can process _overnight_? What the hell?"

"It's amazing what a little Federal emphasis can get you, isn't it? Don't take it personally. We don't have to ID him or search a data base, we just compare it with the data we already have. That's why we can turn it around so quickly. And there's a lot of data on Jack Reacher from what I've seen."

This raised my sheriff red flag to half-mast. "Oh, now why don't I like the sound of that? What does that mean, T.J.?"

"You're not going to be happy with my answer."

"Try me."

"His prints and DNA turn up in quite a few reports going back a couple of decades, reports of things he's been involved in after mustering out of the Army in the late 80s. In fact, he's worked with the FBI on a number of things. _They_ sought _him_ out. In a consultant role, it seems. Once they even hired him to run mock assassination scenarios for a Vice-Presidential candidate. And there are even more reports where he was acting on his own. Thing is, a lot of this stuff is redacted."

"'Redacted'?" Vic repeated. "Why redacted?"

"You'll have to ask somebody else. My pay grade doesn't go high enough to let me know any of those answers."

"Okay. Thanks, T.J." I ended the call.

"This is getting interesting. The guy was a special investigator for the Army; not just an investigator, he was a major in charge of a unit of investigators. Mustered out at a relatively young age, but evidently keeps his hand in working with the government on special cases every so often. So if he's involved in this, how is it nobody knows anything about it?"

"Hopefully somebody who was there can shed more light on it."

We didn't see any 1972 green Buick Rivieras heading north on I-25. We didn't see any that weren't green either. We didn't see any at all. We waved at Double Tough as we rolled through Powder River Junction. The sun stayed hidden above the low clouds that overspread the rumpled, brown landscape like a dirty wool blanket. Old snow lay in the shadows of low bluffs, and in the creases that marked drainages where no water would run for several more months. Aside from a few pronghorn, that was about as exciting as it got until we made it to Casper.


	11. Chapter 11: Walt

Just before we got to Casper, I used Vic's phone to reach out to the Wyoming Attorney General's office and speak with the Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time. It wasn't like I needed much arm twisting to call.

She didn't even say hello. "Hi, Vic. What has Daddy done now?"

"Hey, Punk."

"Daddy, why are you using Vic's phone?"

"We're heading down to Casper in the Bullet and she's driving while I make phone calls. I need a favor."

I explained the situation, leaving out the part about my connection to Jack Reacher. I was still coming to grips with having that season in my life resurrected; I wasn't ready to talk about it just yet. I had yet to even mention it to Vic. Turned out my Italian undersheriff was a step ahead of me. No surprise there. Cady promised to call me right back after she checked with whoever was in charge of the Wyoming portion of the investigation, leaving Vic an opening. "So how long before you tell me about Reacher?"

"What?"

"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm asking. I read the report too, remember? I saw Reacher senior's stationing at your same air base in Vietnam at the same time you were there." She nailed me with those tarnished golden eyes. "Your sudden desire to jaunt down to Casper was a dead giveaway. You know something about him! Somehow this is personal now. I've been waiting for you to stop pondering the meaning of life in all this and talk like a regular person."

I decided to cut to the chase. "I'm sorry."

She snorted. "You always say that! I don't _want_ you to be _sorry_ , I want you to _talk_ about things! Open up!"

Of course, my native inclination when faced with a demand to talk was to clam up even more, but I overpowered it through sheer force of will. Unfortunately, the skill set dictated by my gender didn't provide me with an extensive list of talking points. "I'm sorry."

"You know what? Screw it! Never mind!" I figured her dismissal would last about three seconds. I was wrong. It took half that. "No! Talk! Treat it like a report. Make it clinical, or technical, or whatever the hell you have to do!"

I cleared my throat. "So, it turns out I did meet Jack Reacher's dad, just once. Boy howdy, the once was enough."

Vic's phone rang. "You're not off the hook," she said.

It was Cady. "Hey, Punk."

"Hey, Daddy. Are you still on I-25? Have you gotten to the bypass yet?"

"Yes and no. We're just passing Hartrandt." The Casper Mountains, an uplift of quake-spawned mesas and ridges, loomed ahead of us, draped in snowy robes, the higher summits lost in the mists pressing down on the small range.

"The agent in the diner who was the truck driver…he's at CPR. He's getting ready to fly down to Denver for a debriefing and a strategy meeting. If you hurry you can catch him there. I guessed and told them to expect you in twenty minutes or so. They said they'd wait fifteen."

"Thanks, Punk. I owe you." She hung up without saying goodbye.

Vic had already moved the Bullet into the exit lane for the bypass highway that pointed us toward Shoshoni, a hundred miles to the west. Thankfully, we were only going eight or nine miles, heading for CPR; the Casper/Natrona County International Airport. She flicked the switch to the light bar atop the Bullet and tromped down on the pedal. "Now we're having fun!"

* * *

"You could be matching bookends."

This was the first thing Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Bernard Williamson blurted out when we shook hands at the airfield where he was waiting to board a shiny Piper M600 turboprop. He carried a small duffel and wore a thick leather jacket with the collar turned up against the ever-present Wyoming wind. He almost had to yell to make himself heard over the idling plane's throaty roar. "You and this Reacher guy, I mean."

"How so?"

"You're both the same size. You could almost be brothers, except, well…you're older."

"What else can you tell me about him? What was his demeanor?"

"His demeanor? He was deliberately attempting to intimidate me."

Vic got to the point. "Did it work?"

"Honestly, yeah, it did, to a degree." I figured it must've, because his face reddened as he spoke. "But more than that, it made me mad! He was an unknown entity. He definitely looked like he could be the muscle for a carjacking crew. When it came down to it, though, I pretty much pegged him for a nobody who stepped into the situation to make points with the girl who was serving him, but I couldn't find out without blowing my cover! I didn't want to throw away the _months_ we spent getting ready for this sting." He gestured emphatically. "It was our _best_ hope to tie all the players together—the guys calling the shots as well as the enforcers. Then we'd go up the food chain from there. All I knew was he wasn't the car owner's son. We don't know what happened to the son."

"He didn't say anything you could tie to the sting?"

"No, or we would've busted him as soon as he got in the car! All we could do was watch and hope we could follow him to the rest of the crew, or that they would somehow initiate contact. And I really need to get going. I'm tasked with driving the truck that will transport the car once it's recovered. Seems FBI pilots are a dime-a-dozen, but truck drivers are hard to come by. Go figure."

"If you happen to see him again and you have a chance, would you give him a note for me?"

He shrugged. "If I see him, which is unlikely." He sounded reluctant.

"Is there something you want to tell me, Agent Williamson?"

"Just know, I'm not going to go out of my way to talk to him again."

"And why is that?"

"The couple of minutes I talked to him, he was very civil, but I got the feeling he would just as soon snap my neck. Maybe even enjoy it. And now I _really_ have to go."

I went back to the Bullet and grabbed an old sheriff's department envelope out of the center console. I glanced up through the windshield as Williamson shifted impatiently from one foot to another while Vic just gave him the Morretti stare. I penned a few quick words on the back of a receipt I had in a pocket of my jacket and sealed it in the envelope.

"Thanks for waiting," I told Williamson when I got back to them. We shook hands again and he hustled over to the waiting aircraft and climbed in. The cabin door closed and we watched the plane taxi away.

Vic turned to me. "So Reacher sucks at first impressions?"

"Or it may be a case of the apple falling not far from the tree."

"Ooo, is that another puzzle piece you're dangling in front of me? Father and son Reachers both suck at first impressions? Or maybe they both intervene in uncomfortable situations?"

"There's two sides to every story. Let's go see if we can talk to the server. She might have a different side."

We left the airport and headed back into Casper, this time with Vic riding shotgun. Instead of the desolate but starkly beautiful high plains scenery that favored us on the way south, now we were passing by airport service industry businesses, junk yards and tank farms. I much preferred the desolation. Within a short time, we came to the turn south toward Rawlins. Vic called the diner but got no answer. I wasn't sure how much involvement we should allow ourselves. We were in no position to invite ourselves into the investigation, nor did I want to make things difficult for Cady by calling the AG's office trying to _get_ us invited. In reality, I didn't want to make things difficult between Cady and me. I didn't want to overstep my boundaries. Cady's job was secure. Hell, she'd be running the place in another five years.

We crossed over the North Platte and drove on past the fairgrounds until we reached the intersection with Highway 220 going south. The diner was just down Cy Avenue and it was closed.

"They probably just closed for the rest of the day, but they can't stay closed too long. What next?" Vic asked.

A few discreet phone calls rendered the phone number of the diner's owner, a woman named Mavis Shockley. Mavis was disinclined to share the server's phone number. "Who are you again?"

"Walt Longmire. I'm sheriff up in Absaroka County."

"This is Natrona County."

"Yes, ma-am, I'm aware of that."

"This isn't one of those scams I keep hearing about, is it?"

"No, ma-am." As if I would admit to being a scammer if I was a scammer. "This is in regard to the investigation being conducted due to this morning's incident in your diner. I'd really like to talk to the server involved."

"Angie? She was here for hours already talking to you folk. Where were you then?"

"We got down here as soon as we were apprised of the incident."

Vic snickered. I glanced over at her and she arched her finely shaped eyebrows and made a face like she was impressed. _Apprised_ , she mouthed. I'm a little slow sometimes, but I know mockery when I see it.

"Well, the diner is closed now and everybody has been sent home for the day."

"Yes, ma'am, we're sitting in your parking lot and we can see that. That's why I was hoping to get Angie's number from you."

"What did you say your name was?"

"Longmire, ma'am. Walt Longmire."

"You're sheriff in Absaroka County." She said it like she was reminding me.

"Yes, ma'am."

"This is Natrona County."

I sighed. Vic snickered some more. Dog whined from the back. The dark windows of the diner stared out over the empty except for us parking lot. "Yes, ma'am."

There was a long pause, like she was trying to understand how two sheriffs could be in one county at the same time. "Well, you'll have to come back on Monday if you want to talk to her. I'm not just giving out her number to a voice on the phone. You could be one of those scammers."

"She doesn't work on Sundays?"

"I don't know how it is up there in Absaroka County, but we aren't open on Sundays. Folks go to church."

The truck was rocking with Vic's suppressed laughter as she writhed in her seat, slapping her thigh in silent spasms of mirth. Dog whined again. "Of course, ma'am. Ma'am, thank you for your time. We'll be back on Monday morning and talk to Angie then. Thank you again." I disconnected before she could take another shot at calling me a godless scammer.

* * *

Most days I can tell what kind of day it's going to be when I get to the office simply by the tone of Ruby's fingers on her computer keyboard. If she pauses, it means she has things to say, and just about anything Ruby has to say is important in one way or another. When she doesn't pause, it either means she wants to finish her thought, or she's perturbed with me over something. If she's not perturbed, she'll usually shoot a quick glance at me over her glasses with a smile. If she doesn't pause and doesn't look at me, the portent is not good.

Vic had Sunday off, so we didn't see each other until Dog and I walked into the jail on Monday. She was waiting for me in the outer office, a sheaf of paper in her hand. Ruby was at her desk tapping away on her computer keyboard, and I could tell by the way she kept tapping that she was on Vic's side, whichever side that was. It seems I'd gotten myself in trouble before I even stepped through the door. That wasn't anything new. Vic shook the pages in front of my face. "Did you see yesterday's Reacher report?"

"Maybe. Is it the one that says he killed three hijackers, shot up a tow truck, held Agent Williamson at gunpoint, assaulted a citizen, and stole a dog before vanishing with the Riviera? Allegedly?"

"Yes! Why didn't you call me?"

"It was your day off. I've made that mistake before."

She rolled her eyes. "You don't think this is different?"

"Different how? How will you knowing this news yesterday instead of today make any difference beyond interrupting your day off? The AG and the Feds can deal with whatever happens next. We don't even know where Reacher is, unless it's somewhere between Colorado and California. Agent Williamson said Reacher implied he still meant to deliver the car to the daughter in Fresno."

"Walt, it makes me feel like an outsider, which is another mistake you've made before. If you want me to be around to take over when you 'retire', you've got a hell of a way of showing it! And just because it's my day off doesn't mean I wouldn't mind at least hearing from you! And don't say you're sorry!"

Ruby's fingers paused. This was the part where I had a chance to redeem myself if I was smart enough. More often than not I wasn't. "I spent a sizeable chunk of time yesterday reaching out to some folks I know to get a better feel for why so much of Jack Reacher's information is redacted. Would you like it if I'd called you in on your day off to help me make phone calls, or to take notes while I talked to somebody on speaker phone?" Ruby started typing again. I had made a good point and she knew it.

"No, I wouldn't have liked it! I would've given you holy hell, but at least I would feel important enough to be asked!"

"Well, I can tell you now, or I can tell you on the way back down to Casper to talk to Angie."

"Do we have to take Dog this time?"

"What kind of question is that to ask right in front of him?"

"I bet you talked about all of this with him yesterday."

"He's a good listener, and he doesn't swear at me."

She didn't swear at me, but she used both middle fingers to give me a double Philly salute.


	12. Chapter 12: Walt

I let Vic drive again. It was a survival skill I'd learned to help distract her when she was annoyed at me. She wasn't fooled for a moment, but she liked to drive, especially with things being as slow in town as they were during the winter, so she was good with it. We took Main St. south. There wasn't much activity in downtown Durant, and even less in the residential blocks beyond. I knew a blue sky spread somewhere above us, but we wouldn't see it today. The forecast hadn't mentioned snow, but that never meant much this time of year. It's Wyoming.

We made the turn past the high school where a few kids, lightly bundled in sweats against the cold, were running the track around the football field. It reminded me that in a couple of months Henry would start his annual spring campaign to get me back in some semblance of shape by making me run with him. Thankfully, he usually slacked off during the winter months. I'm not sure if it was actual slacking or more of a cultural lessening of effort, hearkening back to the days when the Northern Cheyenne spent the better part of winter sequestered in their buffalo hide lodges, surviving on pemmican, and reinforcing ancient ancestral tales around the fire in the center of each lodge. I wasn't about to ask which it was for fear of arousing his native bent for torturing me by exercising me to death. Maybe he figured I was burning enough calories just trying to stay warm.

Vic steered the Bullet onto the southbound highway entrance ramp and gunned the big Triton V10. The speed limit was 80 miles per hour and she made it her duty to use every bit of it and then some. The ice had mostly melted away in the two days since our last trip south and the highway was clear. She waited until we passed the KAYCEE 43 CASPER 110 sign before she began her interrogation. "So tell me about the redactions."

"Jack Reacher was a major in the U.S. Army. He headed up an elite team of investigators who were together for several years, and word is they were among the best there was, at the time at least. So some of what I learned is understandable."

"'Understandable'? What does that mean?"

"Reacher's been out of the Army for a while now. Longer than he was ever in, in fact. But in that time he's been involved in a number of federal investigations, some of them fairly high profile in a clandestine sort of way."

"Yeah, T. J. told us all that two days ago."

"She told us about Reacher working with the FBI running mock assassination scenarios. She was wrong, or maybe she was telling me more without really telling me, like pointing me in a direction."

"I don't understand."

"Reacher worked with the Secret Service on the scenarios, not the FBI. I thought maybe she made that slip on purpose so I would look a little farther afield, so that's what I did. Reacher has 'consulted' in cases, yes, with the Secret Service and the FBI, but also with the Treasury Department, the DEA, the DOJ and the CIA."

"Redactions make sense then."

"He's also worked with law enforcement departments, big and small, from the Los Angeles and New York PDs down to little bitty police departments in rural areas all over the country."

"So he must charge a hefty consulting fee if he's in such high demand, right? Must be stinking rich. I hate him already."

"Here's something you'll appreciate. He won the Wimbledon Cup some years ago."

"You mean the 1,000 yard shooting trophy Wimbledon Cup, right? Not the tennis one."

"Would you appreciate it if he'd won the tennis trophy?"

"Hell, no." She shook her head, keeping her eyes on the highway ahead of us.

"He set a match record of some sort. Omar confirmed it when I called him to see if he knew anything about it. Get this, Omar was even there to see Reacher win the match. He begged me to bring him to meet Reacher if he ever surfaces again. Best of all, Omar had a contact number for somebody who had helped Reacher take down a Russian gang."

"Wait, 'ever surfaces again'? What does that mean?"

"Reacher is a drifter."

"He's not rich?"

"Nope. No address, no driver's license, no phone number, no family ties, no consulting or private investigative business, no connections to black ops groups that anybody is aware of. In fact, just finding him is half of any investigation he's ever involved in. The only person who is able to get in contact with him with any kind of certainty is the CEO of a very successful security consulting firm in Chicago, a woman named Frances Neagley."

"So did you try calling her to get her take on things?"

"I didn't get a chance. She called me first."

* * *

I wasn't having much luck trying to learn more about Jack Reacher. A certain amount of information was available. His father, Captain Stan Reacher, died in 1988. His mother, who was French, passed away two years later from cancer. He had one brother who worked for the Treasury Department and was killed in the line of duty nine or ten years after that. Finding anything beyond that was turning out to be something of a stone wall. Part of that was because it was Sunday. I had a number of contact sources, but most of them were through official phone numbers. I wouldn't expect to reach them on Sunday. If I had a computer I could email people, or Gargle or Google them or whatever it's called, but that wasn't going to help me now.

Omar had given me the number of an ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Samuel Cash, who ran a shooting range in Kentucky. The shooting world is a small one, after all, and after thinking about it, the connection between Reacher, Cash, and Omar wasn't surprising. Omar and Cash had stood side by side and watched Reacher outshoot a field of Marine snipers at the invitational Wimbledon's Cup match, and Omar somehow knew that Gunny Cash had had further contact with Reacher at some point in the following years after Reacher's discharge from the Army.

Sunday is a busy day at any range, so I knew I'd get an answer of some sort when I called, and I did. Cash answered the phone himself, but was evasive on the subject of Jack Reacher at first. It helped that I had been a Marine Investigator myself.

As it was, he took my number and promised he would make a couple of calls, but told me not to get my hopes up. "I've tried once or twice myself to get in touch with Jack Reacher, but they were just spur-of-the-moment attempts and I was never motivated enough to follow through. The man is always moving. He leaves about as much behind him as a leaf does blowing across the ground. Hey, tell Omar 'hello' for me when you see him and that I'm still waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"Oh, he'll know."

I hung up. Omar knew the oddest people. I leaned back in my chair and looked at the clock on the wall. It was close to noon. Dog was sprawled on the sofa, the rumble of a snore making an occasional foray into the otherwise still office. He hadn't so much as flinched in the last hour. I whispered, " _Lunch_." He still didn't flinch but his one visible eye popped open and rolled to look at me where I sat behind my desk. I pushed up out of the chair and reached for my sheepskin jacket. Dog was off the sofa and into the middle of the outer office before I even pushed an arm into a sleeve.

We went down to the Busy Bee, where I got the usual for me and one for Dog. Today it was a Reuben sandwich. Dog wanted fries with his, so I got some for each of us. Henry was going to have his work cut out for him come spring.

When we got back to the jail, my phone was ringing. My direct line, not the main line. I picked it up. "Absaroka County Sheriff Department, Walt Longmire speaking."

A woman's voice, cool and direct: "Sheriff Longmire, I understand you're asking questions about Jack Reacher."

"To whom am I speaking?"

"My name is Frances Neagley. I served with Reacher in the 110th SIU. Now I run a security consulting firm in Chicago."

Interesting.

"Okay. How is it you found out about my interest in Reacher, Ms. Neagley?"

"That's not important. What's important is why you're asking about him."

Dog was sitting next to my chair, a long string of saliva extending from his muzzle and dripping onto the floor. I unwrapped his Reuben and gave it to him. He took it away with him to lay down in front of the sofa and dismantle it. He doesn't like sauerkraut. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. "Why did you even ask for it if you're just going to take it apart like that?"

"Excuse me?" said Neagley.

"Sorry, I was conferring with a colleague." I heard the fax machine out at Ruby's desk start to whir and churn. "Yesterday Reacher was identified as being in possession of a vehicle that is potential evidence in an international smuggling operation. A multi-state law enforcement and Federal task force investigation hinges on the delivery of that vehicle to individuals involved in the smuggling operation. A sting was set up to facilitate that delivery and Reacher stepped in unexpectedly. I'm just trying to understand his involvement, and that only because I met his father Stan Reacher in Vietnam during the war. Now, I'll ask again, politely, how you got my number and how does my interest in Jack Reacher matter to you?"

The fax machine at Ruby's desk beeped, signaling it was done printing. Dog came back for his fries. I put his cardboard tray of the fried potato strips on the floor beside my chair. After a moment of snuffling indecision, he decided to eat them there rather than take them back to his spot in front of the sofa.

"So your own interest in Reacher is peripheral. Nothing to do with the investigation in an official capacity." She was making statements, not asking questions.

"Yep."

I heard a ding, then the tapping of a keyboard on her end of the phone line. "Sheriff, I just received an email that I'm forwarding to your Department inbox. You'll need to see it if you haven't already."

"I don't do email."

There was a pause. "You have an email address."

"Emails go to my receptionist and she leaves me a Post-it."

Another pause. "What about fax?"

It was my turn to pause as I connected the dots in my mind. It's what we investigators do. "Excuse me for a moment." I got up and nudged Dog aside with my foot so I could get out from behind my desk and go out to Ruby's desk. I came back with a few yellow fax pages in my hand. I looked them over very briefly. This was not good.

"Ms. Neagley, since you already have a copy of what I just received, I suspect you understand that my interest in Reacher has just become a little sharper."

* * *

"So this Neagley person got the same report we got at the same time we got it?" Vic asked. "Shit, she's got good connections. What else did she say? Does she know how to contact him?"

"No. She said he doesn't like to be on the grid anywhere. He pays cash for everything. The only time anybody knows where he is is when he cashes up at an ATM, or he's involved in an incident like the one down in Colorado two days ago. The only way she can contact him is by leaving cryptic deposits in his bank account that let him know to call her."

"What else did she say?"

"She said if he's involved, he'll do the right thing. Might not be the legal thing, but it will be the right thing. He's generally cooperative with law enforcement, as long as they don't 'mess with him.' It's some kind of personal code.'

"Sounds like some kind of loose cannon asshole thug to me."

"Appearances aside, she was very careful to emphasize that he's not anything of the kind. He's freakishly smart, freakishly strong, and there's nobody she would rather have on her side in any kind of conflict, period."

"Just don't mess with him."

"Well, yes, there's that."

We exited I-25 at Poplar and headed south, crossed over the frozen North Platte, made the right turn on Cy, and passed by the fairgrounds before arriving at the diner to talk to Angie. We turned into the diner parking lot and saw it, big as life and twice as green. A 1972 Buick Rivera, parked right out in front of the diner.

"Shit!" Vic breathed. "Would he really come back here?" She parked the Bullet nose-to-nose with the Riviera. The head of a big russet colored hound dog popped up in the back seat. "There's your stolen dog," she said.

"Yep."

We climbed out. The diner was quiet. Our two vehicles were the only ones in the lot. Looked like the breakfast rush was over. I came around the back of the Bullet and joined Vic to look over the Riviera. "Look," she pointed out a bullet hole in the rear quarter panel behind the long door on the passenger side. The sharp edges of the hole indicated the bullet had been fired from inside the car and exited through the sheet metal. "Looks like a .45," she said. I nodded and glanced back over at the diner. Still quiet. The hound inside the Riviera looked at us through the glass. The window was down an inch, so I put my fingers up to the opening and let him smell them. He lapped out his big pink tongue through the gap and licked me.

"Well…" I said, wiping my fingers on my jeans. I stepped over and kicked the front tire once with the toe of my boot and made up my mind. "Let's go see what Jack Reacher is having for breakfast."

We turned and were walking toward the diner when Vic said, "Walt" the way she does when she wants me to see something. I turned and a dark, government-issue sedan was just bouncing up the entrance driveway into the parking lot. I saw two men in dark suits behind the windshield as the car barreled down the lane toward us. I stepped in front of it and held up my hand, making sure my badge and gun were visible. The driver stopped hard a couple of feet from my knees. I went to his window as the glass lowered.

"What's the rush, gentlemen?"

"We've got a report of a dangerous suspect in the diner," he waved at the restaurant windows. "We need to keep him from fleeing again!"

"Are you DCI or FBI?"

"DCI! Who are you?"

"Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, and Mr. Reacher is not going anywhere, so take a few deep breaths and let me talk to him."

"Longmire...are you related to Cady Longmire?

"Father."

The driver pointed at the diner in frustration. "He killed three men down in Colorado."

"I heard the same thing. I'll talk to him about that."

His mouth opened and closed a couple of times like a fish out of water. "You'll talk to him?"

"Yep."

We stared at each other for a few moments. I'm pretty good at staring. Finally the driver swore. I took it as a surrender and patted the door frame in dismissal. He buzzed the window up and turned into the next lane and parked a few spaces down. Vic and I resumed our walk to the diner. "They're just the first ones to get here," said Vic. "You know that, right?"

"I know."

And there was Reacher. In the last booth at the far end of the window, sitting where he could see the rest of the diner's interior and a good portion of the lot outside. A waitress sat across from him. They were both looking out the window at us. He was looking right at me, with eyes I'd seen long ago. The same eyes as the man I'd met on a night so many years ago in a hot, dark alley outside a bar in Saigon. A man who walked alone through a crazed mob with a gun in his hand, and saved my life.


	13. Chapter 13: Walt

We entered the diner. The server got up from the booth and started to leave, but I stopped her. Turning to Reacher I asked, "Have you ordered yet?"

"Just coffee so far." His voice was deep. It wasn't loud, but it carried, if that makes any sense.

I turned back to the girl. "It's Angie, right?" She nodded. "Can you bring us three breakfasts. The usual? And a pot of coffee?"

"I don't know your usual."

I smiled at her. "Trust your instinct."

I shed my sheepskin jacket and dropped it in the booth behind me, then slid into the booth where Angie had been sitting across from Reacher. Vic took half a seat on one of the stools at the counter directly opposite the end of our table. She rested her left boot on the stool's footrest, and let her right boot stay on the floor. Her left elbow went onto the counter, and her right palm rested on her right thigh, inches from her holstered Glock.

Reacher noticed the triangulation and accepted it for what it was with what might've been an ever so slight amusement that only showed in his eyes. Vic's cell phone rang. She pulled it out without looking at it or taking her eyes off Reacher and leaned over to slide it along the table where it stopped in front of me. "It's for you," she said.

I picked it up and checked the screen, then accepted the call.

"Hey Punk."

'Dad, what are you doing?"

"Having breakfast. What are you doing?"

"I know where you are and who you're with. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you're going to be in?" She sounded pretty upset.

"I do. And I know this puts pressure on you, but I'm asking anyway. I'd appreciate it if you could keep them off my back for a while."

"Daddy, I—"

" _Cady._ " Using her name got her attention like nothing else. "This is important." I paused a moment. I wanted to say this right. "Reacher and I are going to talk about old times. We could use your help."

She didn't respond to that, but I heard her breathing, so I knew she was there.

"Thanks, Punk." I disconnected.

I put the phone on the table and sat back in my seat, looking across at Reacher the same way he was looking back at me. Studying. Examining. Trying to see what wasn't on the surface.

Because what was on the surface was rough, very rough. Williamson had been right; we _could_ be bookends, size wise, but that's as far as the resemblance went. It was easy to see why he had been intimidated. If you took Superman, made him bigger, blond with a grown-out military cut and three day beard, put him in street clothes and nicked and scuffed him up a bit, assuming that was possible, you'd have something close to Reacher. He had yet to say a word, but there was an air about him that demanded attention. He was looking at me with a concentration I'd only seen a very few times. And it wasn't simply his direct gaze that got my attention. I got the feeling he was absorbing everything around him in a way that defied description, as if all of his five senses and a few others were cataloging every sight, every sound, every smell, interpreting all of them and ordering them in his mind for an appropriate level of instant response come what may. No way to surprise him. All of this while looking relaxed, but in charge somehow.

That was it. Somehow it felt like Vic and I were the ones who had come here to be debriefed.

The best tool I have as an investigator is listening. People are uncomfortable with silence. The discomfort comes from uncertainties on their part; uncertainty in what I may know about them, uncertainty about legalities and penalties, uncertainty about saying the wrong thing. The uncertainties push them into filling that silence with excuses, with explanations, with alibies, and anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law.

Reacher knew all of that. He was reflecting it back at me, knowing I would understand that listening was a tool he was also well versed in using. It was there in his eyes. In spite of what I'd been told by Williamson and Neagley and others, I found myself having to reassess what I thought I knew about him. It reminded me of my chess matches with Lucian. He was always a half dozen moves ahead of me, no matter how long I pondered my choices.

Two more dark sedans appeared in the parking lot. One stopped at the back of the Riviera, blocking it in. The other continued on to park next to the first car. Nobody exited either vehicle.

Reacher studied them through the glass. "You carry some influence," he finally said.

"Do I? What makes you say that?"

"It's obvious. The agents in those cars are just waiting. They aren't taking up defensive positions behind their vehicles. They aren't waiting for a SWAT team, although I expect one to show up. Somebody is telling them to wait. And assuming Cady is your daughter, and she works for the FBI or Wyoming DCI or whoever, her position is probably too junior to have the weight to hold these people back on her own. She's too young. Plus, you're from another county. In fact, you're sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in the country, but something gives you the standing to make up for all that. Previous military service since you knew my father like your note said. Some medals besides the junk ones. Years, decades probably, on the job here in Wyoming, successful career, good at what you do. On top of that, you've been around the block a few times. You've done high profile work in a relatively low profile job. Sound about right so far?"

Angie came back with the pot of coffee I'd asked for. "I'll be right back with your breakfasts." She smiled at us, mostly Reacher, before she left. I picked up the pot as Reacher pushed his half-full mug into the middle of the table. I freshened his cup, then turned mine over and filled it as well. Vic vacated her position on the stool and peeled off her duty jacket, dropping it on mine. She squeezed onto the bench seat next to me with her own mug.

"It looks like you guys aren't going to shoot each other anytime soon, so I'm joining your party." I scooched closer to the window and poured her coffee too. To Reacher Vic said, "Yes, we know you're armed with at least one handgun, a .45 Glock."

"I could've ditched it."

"Guy like you? Uh-uh." She pulled her coffee in close. "Besides you've got it under your right thigh as we speak."

"And I have a G17 in my jacket pocket. Spoils of war." An interesting choice of words.

"As long as it stays there, we're okay," said Vic. "I would've hung on to both of them too,"

Reacher glanced back and forth between the two of us and raised his mug in a salute. "So, like I said," he nodded to me with a bristly chin, "you carry some influence. You have a reputation that precedes you." He sipped his coffee. Something in his manner changed when Vic joined us. This was a man who liked women, not in a dominating or overtly masculine way. I couldn't put a finger on it just yet. I suspected Vic felt it too and it made her feel comfortable enough to relax her guard and join us, in spite of what she said about Reacher being armed.

More cars and SUVs were arriving outside, some of them obviously government vehicles, and some state law enforcement, as well as locals. Vic frowned. "Why is this starting to feel like that last scene in _Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid_?"

"There aren't any guns out yet. That's a good sign."

Reacher sipped his coffee again. "You didn't come down here to talk to me, did you? You wanted to talk to Angie."

"Yep."

"Why?"

"I wanted to get a sense of how much of your father has been carried forward in you. I wasn't sure if I'd ever get a chance to actually talk to you. Talking to her felt as close as I was likely to get."

"You talked to Ron, didn't you?"

"Ron?"

"The truck driver."

I nodded. "Yep. Agent Williamson. I talked with him. He was helpful, but I needed more."

"Why 'more'?"

I shrugged. "I'm a curious man."

Angie showed up with our breakfasts. It turned out the usual was corned beef hash with melted cheese and a short stack of buckwheat pancakes. To Reacher, she said, "Let me know if you need anything else." It was almost a purr.

He smiled. "Thanks." She left and Reacher took a moment to enjoy watching her go.

"Well, you two seem to get along pretty well," Vic said.

"We're engaged."

That stopped Vic for a moment and Reacher said, "So…tell me about my father."

I took a sip of coffee and cleared my throat. "I met him in Vietnam. This was in '68, maybe summer? I'm not completely sure. The Tet offensive was over, definitely. I was stationed at Tan Son Nhut, the big air base outside of Saigon. We had Marines, Army, Navy…every branch had people deployed there."

"I'm familiar," Reacher said.

"Right, I suppose you would be. Anyway, back in the states I'd done some boxing at the University of Southern California, and throughout my time in the Corps, I continued fighting on and off—fought in some Golden Gloves type matches, was on the West Pac All Marine boxing team, that sort of thing. We had a big match coming up against a local boxing club that drew fighters from the South Vietnamese army. Tensions were high around town wherever troops spent leave time. The Vietnamese mob even had money riding on several of the bouts—I didn't find that out until later. In fact, there were four rival mob bosses and they all had stakes in the match.

"So, one night I was in a bar, hadn't been there too many times, but my usual bar had lost its appeal. Long story. Anyway, it was late, and as I was leaving, a guy in a group coming in bumped into me. I think he meant it to be a hard bump, but the Vietnamese are not a sizeable people, and I don't bump too easily, especially back then.

"Of course, he took offense, said it was my fault. It was a classic set-up—you know, you've seen it a thousand times; locals picking a fight with the foreigners. I wasn't going to bite. I apologized, but he wouldn't let it go. I just walked past him and he followed me, shoving me in the back, swearing in Vietnamese and calling my ancestors all kinds of degrading things."

Reacher said nothing.

"But when we got outside, I found a ring of guys waiting on the sidewalk under the neon lights. Several rings of guys, in fact, all of them staring at me, none of them smiling, and it occurred to me that this was perhaps something more than a simple drunken altercation."

"Through just the sheer presence of numbers, I was jostled and pressed into an alley next to the bar." I paused for a bite of hash, which was probably a mistake because I had to talk around it. "I'd been almost two years in-country. I'd smelled a lot of smells. Never anything like this. Not just alcohol. Not just sweat. It was a miasma of pure hostility and menace. And some shit that got stepped in, I'm pretty sure."

"' _Miasma_ ,' Vic repeated. "Not a real sheriff-ey word."

"I wound up maybe ten yards into the shadows in this alley—boxes and cans of rotting trash lining the brick walls, garbage underfoot—surrounded by a mass of cursing, shoving Vietnamese, who now backed away from me and left me in the rough center of a ten foot ring of empty cobblestone. I'd been a little buzzed leaving the bar, but by now I had pretty much sobered up."

Reacher said nothing.

"And as if it wasn't already hot enough, someone lit fires in a couple of the trash cans. The brick walls and the faces in the crowd took on this hellish, smoky glow. A guy dressed in pieces of a South Vietnamese army uniform pushed through into the circle, and the mob started cheering and chanting a name: _'Tien! Tien!'_ He peeled of his shirt, put up his fists and settled into a fighter's stance.

"I realized I was only going to exit this alley in one of three ways. I could be carried out, I could fight my way out, or I could be carried out after trying to fight my way out. If anybody had been there to ask me which I thought it would be, I would've said Number Three."

Reacher said nothing. Given what I knew about his military upbringing and career, I figured he was thinking back on some of his own fights in different alleys around the world.

"So the crowd was shouting, yelling for blood, egging both of us on. We were circling, measuring each other. Tien, he was shorter than me, and I had the reach on him, but weight-wise we looked pretty even. For a Vietnamese national, he was a giant. He moved in, tried a couple of jabs, but it felt wrong, like he wasn't taking it seriously. I was wondering what his strategy was when someone behind me whacked me in the back of the head with some kind of club.

"At the same time, Tien rushed in and hit me with a straight right that laid open my cheek. I'm already dazed from the blow to the back of my head, and now I'm bleeding pretty well to boot. The circle had closed in until we barely had enough room to fight. Hands on my back kept shoving me at him. He feinted and I raised my left to block and— _wham_ —somebody from behind hit me again. Through the stars and cobwebs, I realized I was bleeding from my left forearm where I'd blocked him. I had enough cognition left to understand he had a small blade of some sort in his fist. A sick feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach, and by this point the mood of the crowd was bordering on berserk."

I took another sip of coffee. Vic's eyes were locked on my face. "Geez, Walt, how come you never told me this story before?"

"'Men of few words are the best men.'"

"You know, it's getting pretty bad when even _I_ can tell you're quoting Shakespeare." She glanced at Reacher. "Was that Shakespeare?"

Reacher nodded. "Henry V, one of the Histories."

She shook her head. "Motherfu—"

I stopped her with a hand on her arm, and she amazed me by not biting it off at the elbow, as I reassessed Reacher again, and his recognition of the quote. To Vic I said, "How should I know which stories you'd want to hear, and which ones would put you to sleep?"

She bumped her shoulder against mine, not gently, and took a bite of pancakes. "Ath-hole."

I continued. "About then the alley was rocked— _BOOM BOOM BOOM_ —by pistol fire. Everybody ducked out of reflex, looking around for the source. A guy, an American with an M1911 .45 raised above his head, pushed into the center of the crowd to stand with the two of us in the flickering yellow glow of the trash can fires. He was tall, dressed in civilian clothes, same as me, but definitely military, same as me.

"My father," Reacher said.

"Yep. Like the cavalry, although I didn't find out who he was right away. Have you heard this story?"

"I overheard my father telling my mother about something that happened while he was in Saigon. He wasn't big on talking about himself. It might've been this. But I never heard any real details, except one. If it comes up in your story, I'll let you know."

"I would've been interested to hear his side of things. Anyway, in the bit of silence after the gun shots, your father called out, 'The next one of you who touches either of these men will be shot. No warning.' He repeated it in Vietnamese.

"Of course they couldn't let it go without testing him. A big, rough-looking individual carrying a stout bamboo staff stepped out of the pack and managed to snarl one syllable before your father shot him through the knee, dropped him on the bricks. No warning. The round ricocheted off the pavement after going through his knee and two other guys behind him went down as well, all three of them screaming bloody murder.

"Your dad motioned with the .45. 'Get them out of here.'

"There were at least seventy or eighty men jammed into that alley, and he stood there with a maximum of four rounds left in his pistol's magazine and backed the crowd down. There was just something in his eyes and the way he stood—he was not a man to be doubted.

"'This fight will continue,' he said. 'Three minute rounds, one minute rest between.'

"I wiped blood and sweat from my face with back of my hand and nodded at Tien with my chin. 'He's got a blade or something in his fist.'

"Your dad said, 'Don't get hit anymore'—which got a smile out of Reacher—"and he lifted his free hand.

"To the crowd, he called out: 'When I drop my arm.'

"Tien and I squared off. Your dad's arm dropped.

"We both had the same thought, which was to go for a quick knockout. Instead we wound up in a clench, me holding his right fist away from me in my left hand while we each punched the other with our free hands. That went on for a few seconds, then I shoved him away and we started circling again. The noise from the mob was growing louder. I moved in on him and tried a couple of quick left jabs, and I could tell by the way he tried to block my blows that the blade was on the bottom side of his right fist, maybe something small glued to his last knuckle. He was trying to cut me with each block.

"I glanced over to see if your father had noticed. He caught my look and shrugged, as if to say, _deal with it_.

"Tien picked up on this exchange and took encouragement. He moved in again, but he was overconfident. I feinted with another left jab and as he blocked it, I crossed with a right that folded his nose against his right cheek with a snap everybody heard. He went down hard on his ass, but he bounced back up right away.

" _BOOM!_ I flinched—everybody flinched. Your dad's pistol was in the air.

"'Three minutes, end of round,' he called out. He was down to three cartridges in his .45.

"There were no corners to go to, so Tien and I backed away from each other as far we were able, which basically put us about eight feet apart. By this time the noise from the mob was nearing the decibel level of a locomotive roaring through the alley. They were following the demand not to touch either of us, but they were making up the difference in shouting and chanting _'Tien! Tien!'_

"Your dad leaned in close so I could hear him. 'Pretty sure the goal here is for Tien and this mob to cripple you, take you out of competition in the tournament! If you die in the process, they'll be just as happy. There's big money involved!' He nodded at Tien. 'That last punch was good but save your hands for the tournament. Bury your fists in his gut! Break his ribs! When he slows down, that's the time to punch his head in!'

"That sounds like my father."

"He stepped back and raised his free hand. 'Ready…' he glanced back and forth between us, '… _fight!_ '

"I had a hard time following his advice. Tien met me in the center with a flurry of blows at my head, trying desperately to open a cut over either one of my eyes with his hidden blade to get me bleeding, affect my vision. I had a hell of a time blocking him.

"I finally saw an opening. Tien had just finished up back-to-back combinations and I stepped in and drove a hard right into his stomach just above his waistband. I followed it up with a left to match. The two blows folded him in a little and his face was right in front of me, so I hit him with my right elbow on the bridge of his already swollen nose.

"He ended up on his ass again. I looked over at your dad to see if he had a problem with the breach in etiquette. He said nothing. Seemed an elbow balanced out a blade."

Reacher nodded. "He taught Joe and me when we were still pretty young to use our elbows instead of our fists when we could. I'm sure he approved."

"The mob didn't agree. They howled. They hauled Tien to his feet and pushed him back into the middle, which was a mistake because his head was still foggy and his reactions were slow. His hands were up, but not too high in case I tried for his body again. I almost felt bad for doing it, but I took half a step and feinted another body blow with my left and he turned to his left as his right dropped to block my punch. My feet were set perfectly, and I pivoted to hit him with a hard straight right hand just over his heart. His whole body started to go slack, but before he had time to fall, I hit him again on his ear with a left cross that was the natural blow to follow the right. And _BOOM_ , another shot ended the round.

"Your father had been standing just to one side beyond Tien and I had an unhindered view of him when he fired his Colt. He hadn't looked at a watch to know when the three minutes were done. He just knew. Damnedest thing.

"Tien was on his hands and knees. He might've gone all the way down if those brick cobbles hadn't been caked with soot and grime and worse things. He already had it all over his backside, and as close to unconscious as he must've been, he was still conscious enough to want to keep his frontside from ending up like his backside.

"Now that no one was clubbing me from behind, I was winning the fight, but the only thing I could think of was that your dad's Colt had only two more rounds in it, assuming he started with one in the chamber to begin with. Maybe he only had one round left. The mob knew the weapon's eight round capacity as well as I did. They glared at him like a pack of hungry wolves. He was cool and calm. Looked a little bored even."


End file.
